What Is Master Data Management and Its Importance?

Businesses that make decisions based on ‘customer intelligence’ must find data management tools to organize the huge amounts of information collected by marketing analytics, Big Data, customer input, and business connections. This is where an MDM Master Data Management software platforms can take your customer data to a place where decision-making can impact corporate growth and drive your customer’s purchasing journey.

What Is Master Data Management 

All companies encounter data that is incomplete or erroneous. Master data management software sets forth rules of consistency and unleashes identifiers that can consistently correct irregularities in your collected data from multiple sources, including:

  • sales leads
  • payment methods
  • customer accounts
  • marketing sources
  • service providers
  • feedback surveys

Master data management (MDM) combines the software tools, data collection processes, and IT technology for enterprise-wide coordination of data to increase the accuracy and consistency of data gleaned from across your business. From purchasing decisions to stewardship and compliance, accurate data management can guide businesses in obeying regulations and treating staff and consumers in the right manner.

WHY MDM: 
Master data management (MDM) surface out of the requirement for businesses to improve the uniformity and quality of their key data assets, such as product data, customer data, location data, etc. 
Most Organization today, especially global enterprises have number of separate applications and systems (ie ERP, CRM) where data that crosses organizational departments or divisions can easily become fragmented, duplicated and most commonly out of date. When this occurs, Getting answers to basic questions such as below; 
• Who are our top performing customers? 
• Which segment of market is doing good? 
• What product(s) have the best margins? 
• How many employees do we have? 
Become tough to answer – or at least with any degree of accuracy. Basically, the need for accurate, timely information is acute and as sources of data increase, managing it consistently and keeping data definitions up to date so all parts of a business use the same information is a never-ending challenge. 
To meet these challenges, businesses turn to master data management (MDM).

Why Is MDM Important?

When you implement master data management tools, you successfully overcome the ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ demon of information collection and processing. If you want to leverage your business data to drive customer sales, improve business processes, and focus product development, then you must have data that is unified and accurate. Here are some reasons why MDM tools are so important:

Increased Spend Visibility – MDM allows for analysis of expenditures and can classify this data into useful categories that can clearly illustrate ways to improve efficiency, compliance, and decrease the cost of procurement.

Supplier Risk Insights – MDM can reconstruct data from vendors across your supply chain to identify those that have may present a critical threat to your operations. This risk assessment is based on past performance data, their financial health, and the supplier’s policies and methods – all of which can be used to improve your companies purchasing processes.

Business Process Standardization – Master data management tools allow companies to unify business procedures and streamline sub-processes that reuse information that is available enterprise-wide. Setting standards encourages continuous business improvements that can reduce losses, increase transparency, and reduce variables in all business operations.

Choose management data management software that can provide insight to boost sales and produces the analytics to achieve your business goals. This process must start with clean, consistent, and accurate data that is curated from across your organization using MDM tools.