What Is Master Data Management and Why Do You Need It?

Today businesses have many separate systems and apps where data crossing the organizational divisions will get duplicated and fragmented, or outdated. When such things happen, answering the basic and critical questions of any kind of the performance metric for the business becomes a big pain.

Getting an answer to such basic question like “who will be our profitable customers?”, or what products or services have best margins?” and in a few cases, “number of employees we have” becomes tough question to answer – or with any accuracy.

To meet such challenges, businesses have to turn to master data management services

What do you mean by master data?

Master data is a consistent set of extended attributes and identifiers that will describes core entities of an enterprise that include prospects, customers, suppliers, citizens, hierarchies, sites, as well as chart of accounts. The master data will take a form of the product, supplier, customer, location or asset information, besides other information sources, which drive your online business.

An efficient Microsoft master data services in the central repository offers you the single authoritative sight of information as well as eliminates expensive inefficiencies that are caused by the data silos. This supports your online business initiatives by linking, identification, or syndication of the information over customers, products, stores or locations, digital assets, employees, providers, and much more.

Advantages of Master data management

MDM or master data management generally connects, and shares information from your systems, which includes CRM, ERP, ecommerce and much more. This allows you create 360° view of the information. You will get to learn everything right from buying record of your clients to availability of the product and interaction of the supplier and more.

MDM generally allows you:

• Deliver personal service & engagement experience.
• De-prioritize unbeneficial activities, which drain your resources and time.
• Concentrate on your goods, service or business attempt on activities that can increase your sales.

Why Do You Need MDM?

The main business benefit Microsoft master data services offers is higher data consistency, for analytical and operational uses both.

The consistent set of the master data on clients or other entities will help to decrease the operational errors or optimize your business processes –just, by ensuring your customer service reps see data on an individual customers & shipping department has got the right addresses for the deliveries. It will increase accuracy of analytics applications and BI, and resulting in the better planning or business decision-making process.

MDM initiatives will help business efforts to actually comply with the regulatory mandates. New data protection and privacy laws have become the best driver for the master data management that will help the companies to identify their personal data that they collect from the people.

Additionally, master data management dovetails with the data governance programs that create the standards, procedures and policies on the data usage in organizations. MDM will also help to improve data quality metrics, which are generally used for demonstrating business data value governance efforts.

MDM systems will be configured for giving the federated views on master data to the data stewards, workers charged with the overseeing data sets as well as ensuring that the end users will adhere to the data governance plans.

Best practices of MDM

MDM grew from the earlier separate methodologies that are focused for consolidating data on specific entities — particularly, customer data integration as well as product information management. Master Data Management brought all of them together in one single category with the broader focus, though PIM and CDI are active subcategories even today.

Whereas master data management is aided by the technology, it is organizational – and people — process it as the technical one. Thus, it is very important that you can involve the business executives or users in the Microsoft master data services programs, particularly if the master data is managed centrally or updated in the operational systems by MDM hub. There are different data stakeholders in the organization that must have their say in the decisions on how the master data must get structured or policies for implementing any kind of changes in the systems.

Wrap Up

Ultimately, when you are deciding on what type of entity must be treated as the master data, its good you categorize them in the terms of behavior or attributes within context of their business requirements needs than relying on the simple lists of their entity types.