Let’s start by painting a picture. You’re working for a manufacturing company, building some cool stuff that people love. That’s awesome! However, as you grow, it starts to become increasingly difficult to maintain data integrity across your organization. Different departments use different systems to work with the same or similar information. You may even have purchased other smaller companies and have to shoehorn their systems in to work with yours. All of these types of scenarios create inefficiencies and inaccuracies, which cost your company money. Nobody wants to spend money on wasteful issues like that, right?
If that sounds familiar, let me introduce you to Master Data Management (MDM). MDM gives you:
- A way to standardize data across your organization from many disparate systems
- A single system of record by use of integrations
- Formalized standards and processes from systems of entry
The Challenge: Data from Different Sources
Let’s take customer data, for example. A customer may interact with your systems from a number of different areas, like your website, mobile app, commerce transactions, etc. While it’s the same customer each time, where and how he/she interacts is different. That means you could potentially have the same information (and updates to that information) for the customer in any number of locations. That can quickly become a nightmare to maintain.
The Solution: One Source of Truth
With MDM, all of those systems are integrating with a single location for the customer’s data, while maintaining standards for that data, too. Not only does this help eliminate duplicate/redundant data, it helps keep create more accuracy, since you always have the latest information no matter what system it came from.
One of my favorite outcomes of MDM, besides clean data, is the magic that can happen when you have all of your data in a single location. You can start to run analytics, business intelligence (BI) and forecasting. And since the data is accurate, you can trust the results of your analytics, which is a huge help for making business decisions.
Here at Sundog, we have a lot of experience with MDM implementations, helping companies reap the benefits of having an MDM system in place. Depending on your situation, there are a number of different tools and offerings. While the initial implementation can be daunting, the benefits are huge. The important thing is to get the conversation started and know there are solutions to your problems. Let us help you find them!
