Data-driven companies are 58% more likely to outpace their revenue goals than entities that aren’t focused on data. Despite the clear benefits of a data-driven approach to business management, anywhere from 10%– 25% of contact records feature critical errors.
If data has such significant business implications, why are errors so prevalent? The likely answer is that many organizations fall short when it comes to Master Data Management (MDM)
Fortunately, you can win at data management and guard against costly errors by prioritizing five essential components for an effective MDM strategy.
What is Master Data Management?
Master data management is the process of ensuring accuracy and consistency across an enterprise’s shared data assets. Master data is uniform information and identifiers that describe various data entities, such as suppliers, vendors, customers, etc.
Without addressing all MDM components, your organization’s pools of business data can become difficult to navigate and even harder to leverage to support decision-making processes.
Conversely, when you master MDM, you can increase data usability and generate a stronger return on investment from all your information-gathering efforts.
Despite this, a recent HFS report found that only 60% of enterprise data can be operationalized. Some survey respondents report that less than 30% of their enterprise data is usable.
These statistics reveal two things. First, the majority of businesses are falling short when it comes to MDM. Secondly, and more importantly, embracing our five essential MDM components can give you a distinct advantage over your competitors.
Priorities for Effective Master Data Management
If you want to achieve effective master data management, you must include the following components in your overarching strategy:
1. Data Governance as a Priority
Data governance is the process of managing the security, integrity, usability, and availability of your organizational data. Data governance lays the foundation for all your MDM efforts. Your data governance strategy should include established best practices and industry-specific standards.
Prioritizing data governance ensures that your information is trustworthy, consistent, and managed appropriately. By contrast, a lack of data governance can lead to data misuse, expose your organization to serious civil liability, and make it difficult to differentiate various types of information.
2. Importance of Data
In addition to addressing data governance, you must ensure that your C-suite understands the importance of data and, specifically, master data management.
The core component of MDM is management. While tools and software solutions assist with data management, MDM isn’t a platform — it’s a philosophy.
If you want to win at MDM, your C-suite has to be on board. When they believe that master data management influences the organization’s direction, they’ll be more willing to invest in the tools and resources necessary to support your MDM initiatives.
3. Data Integration
Before you can rein in your organizational data, you need to tear down data silos. However, integrating data across disparate systems needs to be done securely, accurately, and without unexpected downtime. To do that, you’ll need a vendor-agnostic solution that can unify your disparate platforms.
The right solution will not only include user-friendly MDM tools but will also support your governance efforts with a full suite of data management software that can be tailored to the unique needs of your business.
4. Mapping Data
Data mapping connects data fields from separate sources, such as your enterprise resource planning platform and customer relationship management software. Mapping your data reduces the likelihood of errors, discrepancies, and other issues undermining your MDM efforts.
Once your data is mapped, you can manage and classify it more effectively. Data mapping can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if you’re using multiple disconnected platforms and relying on multiple vendors.
Many organizations turn to cohesive data management solutions like Syniti's to simplify data mapping processes. Our solutions eliminate MDM complexities associated with sprawl and work with multiple vendors so you can efficiently manage your data.
5. Ignoring Unnecessary Components
Master data management is complicated. Due to the inherent complexities associated with this process, it’s easy to become distracted by unnecessary MDM components.
As such, you must be mindful of common errors, pitfalls, and MDM misconceptions that hinder your ability to manage your master data. We’ve outlined several such stumbling blocks below.
Common MDM Challenges
One of the biggest challenges associated with MDM is a phenomenon known as “split brain.”
Split brain occurs when two systems, such as your ERP and CRM, both believe they have the correct data. This can be avoided by defining clear ownership roles for each system. For instance, you can designate the CRM as the source of truth for user account data and the ERP as the SKU owner.
Another common challenge is in selecting the wrong MDM architecture. While no architecture is perfect, choose a framework that best aligns with your organization’s needs. Taking the time to find the right architecture will make MDM far more manageable.
Lastly, treating MDM as an afterthought can lead to significant challenges the longer it’s put off. All other data-related functions become more manageable when you devote adequate time and resources to MDM from the outset.
How to Leverage MDM Components
Incorporating all five of the MDM above components doesn’t have to be a complex, frustrating endeavor. When you have the right tools at your disposal, you can simplify traditionally challenging processes like data governance, integration, and mapping.
While many such tools exist, no others stack up to Syniti Knowledge Platform (SKP). SKP has received exceptional client feedback and includes a dynamic array of tools, including a master data management platform. SKP seamlessly integrates with your enterprise resource planning solution and provides tools to assist with migrations, governance, data mapping, and more.
Schedule a demo and see why clients trust SKP to solve their MDM challenges.