8 Reasons Your Company Needs Master Data Management

Introduction

Managing and succeeding in this knowledge era is highly dependent on leveraging data.  Data helps you know your customer, market and get a better focus on executing efficiently. However, inaccuracies in data can quickly deteriorate any value that you would otherwise extract from it. Furthermore, you also need that data to be accessible for you and your team to help guide your path easily. If accessing correct and accurate data is a challenge for your organization, a common problem for growing companies, then you may need to work on implementing a master data management solution first.

What is Master Data Management

Master Data Management is having a single source of truth. A single source of truth is a concept in data management that refers to having a central, authoritative, and trusted source of information for important entities like customers, vendors, products, items, and assets. 

The term single source of truth is often used when discussing master data management (MDM), which aims to provide a single version of each entity (such as a customer) that is most accurate and up-to-date. 

Recognizing Your Master Data Entities is the First Step 

Clean data requires mastering data first, which means you need to have recognized the most critical entities your business resolves around like customers, vendors and their products, assets, your products, and employees with accurate information across your systems before you can start making sense of it. If that data is full of errors, missing information, and duplicates, then any insights you get will be wrong or misleading.

1. Improve Data Quality and Decisions Based on Data

Data quality is a measure of the correctness, accuracy, and consistency of data. Every organization has large volumes of information that they use every day to make business decisions. If you have inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete data in your systems, then it will be difficult for your business to make accurate decisions based on this information.

Data Quality issues are a significant challenge for businesses today, with costs estimated at $900 billion annually worldwide (according to Information Management). MDM solutions help organizations improve the quality of their master data by ensuring it is clean, accurate, and consistent across all applications. 

Data quality is essential because poor-quality information leads to bad business decisions based on faulty assumptions about what happened or how people behaved in certain situations in the past. With MDM, businesses improve their ability to understand how well their internal processes collect accurate information so they can compare results before making changes that may not be necessary at all costs (or worse yet, damaging).

2. Become Faster at Change

Solve your data problems once instead of solving problems with data every time you build an integration between two systems. A centralized MDM or data hub will help you save time on the next integration. 

The world is changing, and so is your business. An MDM solution will help you be more agile. 

Let’s start with the latest technology. MDM tools help you build the next product or service faster. You'll be able to manage all of them at once without going through complex processes like manual integration.

Now let's look at trends in the industry. New laws and regulations are being passed every day that may affect your business in one way or another, especially if they relate closely with what kind of products or services you offer (i.e., banking). With an integrated system like this in place, all relevant changes will be automatically updated so that no mistakes happen down the road due to a lack of knowledge about these changes from within each department within your company as well as between departments across multiple locations around the world!

3. More Efficient Data Distribution

Your team can easily access and share data across departments when you have a master data management (MDM) system in place. Your data team can also more reliably push data into the right tool. This is especially important for companies with multiple departments working on the same project or process.

If your company has multiple systems for different departments, they may not have the ability to see data from other departments. For example, if you’re sales team is using a CRM and want to understand what the previous orders are for a particular customer, they may have to access the ERP system. Switching context alone is time consuming and expensive . With an MDM system in place, all these teams will have access to this information without having to switch between system —they can simply pull it up as needed!

4. Better Inventory/Asset Management

Your inventory is a critical component of any business, and it's what helps give your products value and helps keep them in the hands of customers who want them. Without good inventory management, you could miss out on sales opportunities or end up with too much stock on hand.

Master Data Management can help with this by providing a single source of truth where all of your product information is stored. This way, you can be sure that the inventory list at each location is accurate and up to date.

Suppose you're working with an MDM tool already. In that case, it may already have built-in functionality for tracking inventory levels and ensuring they stay within certain parameters based on demand—but it's usually worth keeping an eye out for new features as they roll out over time!‍

5. Better Compliance 

The more accurate and up-to-date your data is, the higher chances that you’ll be able to meet compliance requirements.

The MDM process will ensure that all information relating to customers (for example) remains consistent across channels so that if a customer calls the call center in one country, they won't receive different information from what was given by someone else in another country depending on which technical system they use as well as ensuring that products are not sold in certain countries where they're not allowed by law or regulations.

6. Improved Productivity

• Automated data validation. Just like with automated data entry, you can automate validation to ensure that all incoming information is correct before it's saved or used. This saves you time because you don't need to check each record manually; instead, the software automatically completes all validations as soon as new data comes in.
• Automated cleansing (or de-duplication). This includes removing unnecessary or incorrect records from databases, known as "record cleansing." 
• Automated distribution: When multiple parties need access rights—such as employees within an organization or partners who need permission levels set up on certain fields—the DBA must distribute those permissions manually after each change occurs…but what if there were tools available that could do this automatically? That would save everyone time! Master Data Management systems allow users with administrative permissions set up their own workflows.

7. Get Ahead of the Curve

Data quality is a crucial factor in business success, and MDM can help you improve that quality. By reducing data duplication, siloed data, fragmented data, and errors, your organization will be able to make the right decisions to streamline processes that affect customer experience. This, in turn, will allow you to gain a competitive edge over competitors who are not using MDM or are using it improperly.

8. Manage Growing Stores of Data

Organizations typically work with a growing number of entities that they need to keep track of. When you have a lot of information, it's hard to know what you've got and where it is. MDM helps by organizing your data into manageable chunks, which makes it easier for users within an organization to find the information they need when they need it.

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Conclusion

When it comes to your company's future, you don’t have time to waste on data that is inaccurate or incomplete. If you have issues with redundant data, conflicting reports, or a lack of clear definitions for your critical business terms and processes, you need to get MDM software now. By working to improve your master data management practices with the right tools and systems, you can make sure that all your employees are working with accurate information—and that they can find what they need when they need it.

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