What is Master Data Management and why is it important?
Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog
Edwards Deming once very famously said “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
And I couldn’t agree more. Data has become a single source of truth and it is estimated that Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers. However, considering that a whopping 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created each day, and that pace is only accelerating, the question most of us ask is that is all data good? How do we know which data to consider and which to ignore? It has often been cited that a lack of trust in data on the part of corporate executives and business managers is a common cause of impediment to using business intelligence (BI).
That is where Master Data Management comes into play. Master data management (MDM) is an integral process by which businesses manage, centralize, organize, categorize, localize and enrich master data according to the business-specific rules applicable to sales, marketing, and operational strategies of any organization. The problem of incomplete or inaccurate data is omni present. MDM tools set rules that implement consistency and idenitify irregularities in data collected from multiple sources such as sales leads, payment methods, customer accounts, surveys, suppliers and marketing sources. MDM thus plays a key role in verifying purchase decisions, compliance standards and supervision.
For the uninitiated master data is any business-critical data about parties, places, and things. Master data can be about product, customer, supplier, location, and asset information, in addition to any information sources that drive a business. Though Master data is a single source of common data, but the challenge that arises is that many distinct data types are stored in systems such as ERP, CRM, eCommerce, HRIS, and more. They are often duplicated across the business as these systems largely remain disconnected and siloed with little interaction and standard definition.
An end goal of an efficient MDM system is to provide businesses with one single source of truth about any information, in the process eliminating duplicate data or erroneous data caused by such data silos. It supports business initiatives by identifying, linking, and filing information across products, customers, locations, employees, suppliers, digital assets, and more. This will enable a business to:
- Focus on product, service, and business efforts on activities that are found to increase sales.
- Deliver a highly personal service and engagement experience to customers so that they remain loyal.
- De-prioritize unprofitable activities that drain time and resources of employees, so that they can focus on important tasks.
Importance of Master Data Management:
One significant challenge that MDM Tools strive to solve is to help businesses sort through the data they amass daily in various Master Data systems. Though Data is supposed to be a source of truth, but ironically enough it has become the devil that is engulfing most business functions across industries. By implementing MDM tools, businesses can overcome the ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ demon of information collection and processing. It thus helps draw better intelligence from the resultant accurate and unified data to augment sales, improve processes, and enhance product development.
Here is an overview of the importance of Master Data Management Systems:
Creating foolproof customer personas: Businesses that have accurate and authentic customer data related to their buying patterns, choices, and preferences are better able to cross-sell and up-sell to them. Creating customer personas through MDM helps businesses predict and pitch products and services that are most likely to match customer needs.
Enhanced Visibility of Business Expenditure – MDM allows businesses to closely analyze and classify data into relevant categories that help to clearly illustrate ways to improve compliance, efficiency, decrease the cost of procurement, and identify value add.
Assess Supplier Risks: MDM can help draw insights from data of vendors from across the business supply chain to identify suppliers that pose a critical threat to operations. Such risk assessment is mostly done on historical data on supplier performance, financial health, policies, and processes. Doing so not only helps optimize a company’s purchasing process but also identifies risks in time to prevent supply downtime.
Standardization of Business Process – Since MDM enables businesses to unify business process systems, this leads to identifying various processes and streamlining of sub-processes that reuse common information that is available in various systems. By identifying duplicate processes to store the same data, businesses can set standard procedures that encourage transparency and reduce variables in all business operations.
In addition to the above, Master Data Management tools offer various other advantages. Several tools are widely available in the market to meet the rising demand for Master Data Management. In fact, the global master data management (MDM) market size is expected to grow from USD 11.3 billion in 2020 to USD 27.9 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.8%.
Boomi Master Data Hub
With various players in the market, one platform that stands out is the Boomi Master Data Hub. Boomi Master Data Hub is a cloud-native master data management (MDM) solution that sits at the center of the various data silos within a business including existing MDM solutions, to provide an easy to implement, scalable, flexible, and secure master data management hub as a service. What sets it apart from other solutions in the market is that Boomi Master Data Hub does not store and manage all data of interest in the organization. Operational systems continue to be the systems of record. Boomi MDH only synchronizes this master data from across operational systems. The actual data continues to remain in the cloud or on-premises or both, within operational databases.
How can Jade Global help?
Jade Global helped a a healthcare-focused marketing communications firm based in San Francisco Integrate Workday®, NetSuite and OpenAir with Boomi MDM. We designed and implemented a solution to automate all manual processes using Boomi MDM. This solution could transform and load employee and cost data from Workday to NetSuite and OpenAir. We configured MDM to restrict all incorrect data to flow to NetSuite and OpenAir by setting up business rules, and governance. To know more about this solution, read here.
This is just one instance of our MDM implementation capabilities. You can know more about our Boomi MDM offerings here.
It would help to state here that Jade Global is a Boomi Certified Elite Partner specialized in enterprise-grade solutions for all types of integration needs. We work closely with Boomi to deliver complex, yet cost-effective integration solutions to help customers accelerate business agility and achieve rapid digital transformation. Our Boomi MDH Implementation Specialists have been helping small to large organizations overcome critical Master Data issues with faster, simple, and cost-effective implementation of the Boomi MDH platform.
To know more, drop us a comment below.
Thanks & Regards,
Shailabh Haldule
The post What is Master Data Management and why is it important? appeared first on NASSCOM Community |The Official Community of Indian IT Industry.
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