A simple test for any CEO to do

Ask your teams responsible for the CRM, ERP, Billing or Logistics systems for a list of customers, suppliers, or products.

Probably each of the systems will return a different list, and none of the systems will have the true view of any of these domains.

When this happens you might be left to think what kind of company does not know who their customers or suppliers are?

And if this happens then most likely there will be issues related with product and material information across multiple disparate systems, multiple IDs for the same product or inconsistent product attribution and/or units of measure across markets, systems, business units or facilities or interactions with multiple suppliers with no catalogue consistency.

Well, you are not alone. Not many companies have this exact view about their customers, suppliers, or products, maybe even employees. Every time a new system is added to your company’s ecosystem it adds to the general complexity of the corporation’s data and reduces the capacity for an integrated view of the organization.

This fact is in the origin of the growing importance for the organizations to create a single, unified view of its master concepts.

MDM can be challenging, as it depends on people, as well as technology, but it is vital for business success.

What are the benefits?

Master data management provides various benefits to the efficiency and success of an organization, either directly or as a support component for many of the digital transformation initiatives, enabling the capability to:

• Base decisions on a consolidated and consistent enterprise level view of customer information

• Achieve a clearer knowledge of the full customer base.

• Enable seamless and consistent cross channel customer experiences.

• To manage the preference and consent information in a centralized manner.

• Improve targeting and personalization to get additional business in a more cost-effective way.

It is important to keep in mind that this value can only be delivered once the master data is consumed by everyone in the organization, meaning that there are costs associated with the integration with other systems (Core, CRM, BPM, Portals, etc.) that must be considered to achieve these benefits.

A master data management initiative cannot be a stand-alone initiative. It is a disruptive process, and its success relies heavily on a strong executive sponsorship and on data governance policies and processes, and to have a focused approach, choosing a business case that can bring visibility to the initiative within a reasonable timeframe and budget, to get the stakeholders buy-in and organizational awareness.