What is Master Data?

At the very basic level, Master Data Management (MDM) eliminates redundant and inconsistent versions of the same data in your organization.

Organizations believe that over 27% of their revenue is wasted due to inaccurate master data.*

Information about your customers, products, and sellers and the relationships between them – all constitutes master data.

Why is Master Data Management important?

Companies today struggle to become agiler by implementing information systems that support and facilitate changing business requirements. As a result, the management of information about products, customers, etc. has become increasingly important.

Consider, for instance, the fact that most companies estimate that they are analyzing only 12% of their  data. These firms could be missing out on the data-driven insights inside of 88% of data that they’re ignoring.*

Additionally, organizations have some system in place to store and retrieve this data. However, many disparate systems store information, which leads to overlapping, redundant and inconsistent data.

For e.g., The definitions of common terms such as ‘supplier’, ‘vendor’ may differ across systems. Different systems are likely to have different rules for data validation and cleansing, etc. Such differences make it difficult for a business to achieve consistent, complete and relevant master data.

This gives rise to an important question –

Where do users go to get valid, accurate, consistent data?

A single word answer? MDM.

Master Data Management (MDM) helps you –

• Provide Seamless Information Across Multiple Channels – Accurate product data is critical to differentiate your business and provide customers with a dynamic and personalized shopping experience. PIM (Product Information Management) helps businesses manage product data from multiple sources. It creates a master catalog of validated, high-quality unique product data for efficient distribution to all sales channels, whether data is structured or unstructured.

• Help Understand Your Customer Better –Customer Data Management helps organizations maintain a single view of all customer data. It synchronizes customer information across systems and the organization’s information supply chain.

• Get A Unified View Of Your Masters – MDM software helps create reliable views to  drive operations efficiently with a complete view of all your data assets. It enables the creation of an integrated view of products, customers, suppliers, materials and other data sets. This data currently may reside in silos with different departments and units.

• Increase Trust In Your Data – Businesses need to rely on high-quality data for quality decision making. Poor quality data can have negative effects on customer relationships, business decision making, and forecasting.

• Connect Everything & Anything – With business information residing in multiple systems and in multiple formats, information users have to duplicate efforts by going through information from multiple systems and combining data together. MDM’s Data integration tool helps to combine data with multiple formats attributes from disparate data sources. It delivers a single unified view of all your data instead of data in silos.

• Be Accountable For Your Data – Easily govern your organizational data for accuracy and accountability with MDG (Master Data Governance) solution.Data Governance brings business users in implementation lifecycle and provides an effective mechanism to manage and author data.

  *Forrester Research

MDM Solutions can help manage your data to deliver an optimized experience to your end customers – and grow your business.  Request a demo today.

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