Master data management has been around for many decades, and has evolved quite a bit from the 90’s to now. It’s the practice of identifying authoritative sources of data, governing that data on the business side, and feeding that data into the correct business systems. Master data management strategies help you translate
data into actionable business results and effectively capture data visualization with business intelligence tools.
There are a host of data definitions important to defining your master data strategy. Master data at the high level encompasses customers, products, suppliers, and financial data. These data sources are core to your business operations.
Current Business Problem:
Many organizations have data all over the place. For example, there is no definition of the ‘master’ data of record for your customers. In this instance, you need customer data in your finance and sales systems in addition to having that customer data fed into your service systems. As with other types of data, you need your customer data in a variety of areas in your business.
Once you identify the ‘what’ you can identify who owns it, what system it belongs in, as well as its authoritative source of record and what systems in your business need to consume it. This concept is essential to ensure you have accurate data and not manual, duplicate, or incomplete data.
How do you know you need help with a master data management strategy?
- You lack a unified view of data across your organization
- Your organization is manually merging data from various sources
- Your organization is spending too much time gathering data to make decisions
- You have bad data quality such as data duplications, discrepancies, and inconsistent formats
- You don’t have data visualization access to reports and dashboards
Solution:
At 5P, what we do with master data is design a strategy that will help you make quicker decisions, reduce manual work, and eliminate data duplication. We do this with our 5P Data Management Strategy:
- Conduct a business discovery session to understand your current pain points and needs. We use our business value roadmap framework to highlight opportunities aligned with business value for the purpose of prioritizing the biggest impacts aligned to your company’s goals.
- Design a recommended future state metadata map and end-to-end architecture. This incorporates data integration and data visualization needs both up and downstream in your business systems.
- Prioritize in partnership with you, the areas of data enhancements to take forward and refine the business processes along with your appropriate architecture (ERP, CRM, CSS, PSA, etc.)
Business Solutions Post Implementation:
After the master data management strategy has been implemented, you should have stronger practices in the areas of how you manage, integrate, and report on your data through business intelligence. You will have fewer manual processes and more accurate data.
Data Management: You will have identified, governed, cleaned, and stored data in your business applications that you will actually use.
Data Integration: Your data that was previously in various sources will now be in a single consolidated view or structure so you can manage your business more efficiently.
Business Intelligence: You will have defined metrics, reports, and dashboards so you can use your data dynamically instead of spending time collecting and cleaning it.
Going into the new year, spend some time thinking about your strategy. Prioritize the importance of data alongside your technology solutions. At 5P we are here to help – reach out to us today for a consultation.