More complex and demanding business environments lead to more heterogeneous systems environments. This, in turn, results in requirements to synchronize master data.
Master Data Management (MDM) is an essential discipline to get a single, consistent view of an enterprise's core business entities – customers, products, suppliers, and employees. MDM solutions enable enterprise-wide master data synchronization. Given that effective master data for any subject area requires input from multiple applications and business units, enterprise master data needs a formal management system.
Business approval, business process change, and capture of master data at optimal, early points in the data lifecycle are essential to achieving true enterprise master data.
The latest buzz phrase in information management is master data management. It’s yet another take on getting to that lofty goal of a “single version of the truth.” Some will say
“Haven’t we been here before?” And you may believe you already do this within the data warehouse or some other existing structure. You could be right. As a matter of fact, a form of master data management is to master it in the data warehouse. As information becomes your corporate asset and you wish to control and utilize it as much as possible, these forms of master data management are seldom sufficient. Likewise, the ERP promise of everything in one system leads companies to think master data could be managed there, however, ERP manages just the master data it needs to function and lacks governance rules to change and syndicate master data effectively.
Focus on Subject Areas
While data warehouses focus on all data – and transactional data is the vast majority –emerging master data management programs focus on the high-quality shared data that the organization needs in numerous systems. This data is grouped as “subject areas” and consequently the MDM culture is a subject area culture. Master data will ultimately comprise only 10% - 15% of the volume of organizational data.
One of the main subject areas companies need to get a handle on is customer. It is, by a margin, the subject area with the largest gap between its current state of management and its potential to the organization. Product is another subject area that is a common need. As a matter of fact, in the early days of master data management software, these two subject areas were spawning their own software categories, and consequently, there are quite a few constructs in master data management specific to these subject areas.
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