Retail Challenges. How Master Data Can Help

These last few months, brought a new question:

Who is driving digital transformation? Is it the CEO, CIO, or COVID-19?

The most frequent answer seems to be COVID-19. The pandemic has pushed businesses into digitalization.

· Organizations maximizing their information will thrive in the post-COVID-19 economy.

· How companies use and leverage data to improve their business is critical.

· The customer experience they want to deliver makes the difference.

· Data privacy and security are a default condition for any solution.

The retail industry was definitely one of the most affected, and although I don’t believe that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered digitalization, it may, in fact, have delayed what that was already underway and forced many organizations to reset their strategies, forcing retailers to radically restructure their business and operating models to quickly adapt to change.

Operating under COVID-19 means organizations need to be agile and data-driven.

During this period, we have witnessed consumers adopting, new, short term behaviours that will to a certain degree become permanent as we emerge to a new economic reality.

The positive results of some of the players in the market, have shown the way and a new set of priorities and objectives.

Whoever wants to thrive in a now more competitive and volatile environment needs to adapt their organizations into fast decision processes, increase their supply chain resilience, integrate multiple channels into a single and improved customer experience and to adapt and foresee their customers’ needs and behaviours.

How Master Data Can Help

To achieve these goals, organizations need to be data-driven, to adopt omnichannel solutions, advanced analytics, and at the same time pursue efficiency gains that will allow them to succeed.

Master data is crucial as the foundation in this process:

• Providing customers, the personal experience they demand.

• Providing the core business data processes with accurate, reliable, and timely information.

• Synchronizing digital and physical channels, accelerate time-to-market and increase up-sell and cross-sell conversions, with the range of products, business partners, and the organizations’ structure with its branches, warehouses, stores, and other sales channels and fully available and consistent.

• Managing the relationship between the organization and its vendors.

• Maintaining high-quality privacy-compliant consumer data.

Master Data Management plays an important role in this solution and a pivotal role in the organizations’ ambitions in a competitive marketplace.

When organizations aim at being data-driven master data must be the primary focus.

Master data is the most valuable data that an organization owns, used across all the organizations’ units, processes and systems to keep the organization working.