3 Considerations to be Successful with Master Data Management
Blog: The Tibco Blog
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Are you on the same page as your technology vendor? It’s important that your technology provider is developing solutions with your biggest challenges in mind. If you’re both thinking along the same line, it’s a good indication the solution is a fit. So, let’s take a look at how TIBCO considers master data management (MDM) and the biggest challenges it can solve.
To understand the TIBCO point of view, let’s start with a few definitions:
Master data is the data that is shared among business teams and systems. Master data management is the governance process for your master data.
A common point of view is that MDM falls into two domains or categories, product or customer data:
- Product master data: Identifiers and attributes of the new product are often shared among product management, marketing, and supply chain teams. Then that information is shared with systems such as ERP and PLM, a common use case for MDM.
- Customer master data: Enterprise sales teams can share identifiers and attributes about customers with the finance department. That information is then pushed out to the CRM and risk management systems.
But, what if we look at all these business teams, systems, and domains together? What we notice is that a siloed product or customer-centric view misses the fact that the domains share relationships or connections.
That’s why TIBCO takes the following three areas into consideration in its MDM solution.
Connections
Customers are connected to products. And products and customers have shared connections to reference data, such as geographies. Bringing together these three big blocks of data (product, customer, and reference data) forms relationships—a web of connections. Therefore, TIBCO’s view of master data is more than just the product or the customer domain separated from each other; it includes the connections.
Usability
To incorporate business users and subject matter experts with a wide range of technical skills, TIBCO prioritizes making solutions that are easy to learn and use for everyone. Usability fosters adoption, and adoption of MDM software by your business users is key to your program’s success.
Governance
Considering the entire governing process end to end, your MDM software needs to provide all the features that support your team from design through deployment, including the ability to change data and users. That is why TIBCO includes data modeling in its solution to define what it is to be mastered and its relationships. It also supports hierarchy management and version control with access to past, present, and future versions of master data.
To summarize, TIBCO’s master data management solution is designed to bring together product, customer, and reference data, to enable collaboration among business teams, and with governance features covering the entire process end to end.
For more, watch this short whiteboard video, to get an overview of our point of view on critical issues and success factors, and how we help address these challenges.
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