What You Need to know about Master Data Management

What You Need to know about Master Data Management

According to data management research by Experian, 69% of the respondent organizations believe that inaccurate data undermines their capacity to offer an excellent customer experience.

Business leaders worldwide have now realized the importance of using clean data to drive their enterprises’ success. To meet their expectations, master data management systems have come up.

Here is all that you need to know about master data management and how it can steer the growth of your organization!

What is master data?

Gartner defines master data as a continuous, uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that reflect the core entities of the enterprise such as the prospects, sites, customers, suppliers, hierarchies, citizens, etc.

In other words, master data refers to all kinds of nouns (locations, products, parties) that describe your business processes. Master data also has subdomains, like parties that include employees, salespeople, suppliers, customers, etc.

Why do you need to manage the master data?

Organizations spend great resources and time preparing data. According to a 2018 report by Experian, 91% of the executives say that collecting data for insights is highly demanding.

All this effort can be rendered meaningless if your data is erroneous. At the same time, several other data issues can creep up if you don’t manage your master data, like:

• Inconsistent data across the organization
• Lack of collaborative authorization
• Missing data governance
• Lack of cross-domain (customer, supplier, product, etc.) relationships
• Tracking previous versions of data

You can easily overcome all these issues if you start keeping your master data clean and synchronized across the organization.

What does master data management include?

Master data management is a combination of tools, processes, and technology to help you coordinate master data across your enterprise.

It enables a unified master data service to monitor and maintain the data structure and empowers the business to gain operational insights and enhance their decision-making potential.

What are the benefits of having a functional master data management system?

Now that we understand the importance of master data management, let’s understand the benefits of a master data management system.

• Seamless integration across channels: With proper master data management, you can create seamless sync between different business departments and customer experience. Be it structured or unstructured, a master data catalog of high-quality data makes it easier to find products and all other required information – anytime, anywhere. This leads to a reduction in data loss as a good data management plan also ensures the backup of this data on a secondary source, in case the primary source is inaccessible.

• Good quality data: Good data management makes it easier for all your employees across departments to find the information that they need for any task. They can easily get structured data to share with others, and store information for easy retrieval in the future. You can get an integrated view of all data sets on customers, products, suppliers, materials, etc. that can be in data silos right now. With proper data management, there is always good data at your disposal, enhancing your enterprise’s productivity and increasing your data’s accountability.

• Enhanced customer analytics: Customer data management helps organizations get a unified view of their customers, allowing them to sync the customer information with the organization’s information supply chain. This facilitates quick access to data and better decision-making as your employees can access information based on market trends faster than the competitors. With good data, you can also understand your customers well.

• Cost-effectiveness: With accurate master data management, organizations can avoid unnecessary duplication of data and ensure responsible archival. This also helps organizations in becoming cost-efficient as they do not have to engage technology or manpower to conduct the same analysis, research, or work that has previously been done.

• Increased security: Your data is susceptible to external threats, when not managed properly. A data breach is common for even large corporations like Domino’s, Mobikwik, and Big Basket. Recently, Restore Privacy reported a massive data breach on LinkedIn whereby the details of 700 million people were put on sale on the dark web. A strong data management system will largely reduce this risk for your organization, enhancing security.

Click here to read about how to get started with strategic master data management.