To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
Master data management (MDM) is fundamental to any organization’s digital transformation. It’s a business-led program that ensures all shared business data, or master data, is consistent and accurate. TIBCO has been recognized for the sixth time as a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant master data management solutions. The Magic Quadrant uses a range of criteria to evaluate the top providers of MDM solutions. The best solution is a comprehensive one that manages, shares, and governs business data assets with the key capabilities to generate actionable insights faster while providing accurate views across all business functions.
What’s Master Data?
Master data, in addition to reference data and metadata, is a key business data asset. Master data refers to the entities that drive business processes, can be evaluated by analytics, and is controlled by data governance processes. From an operations point of view, master data represents transactional entities. From an analytical or business intelligence point of view, it’s all the entities that are tracked or examined by the organization. From a governance point of view, master data is the entities subject to controls.
Essential Capabilities of MDM
A successful MDM solution features several essential capabilities. The best solution has flexible data-modeling features that offer a centralized view of all relationships between different types of data, providing clarity of complex cross-domain relationships and a flexible, multi-domain solution. MDM platforms should support all styles of data management, including centrally authored, consolidation into golden records, coexistence, and registry.
The best solutions allow business users to publish and subscribe to data on demand, providing accurate data to systems when needed in the manner needed without compromising security. Real-time data allows organizations to better react to data and make more expedient decisions based on actionable insights. The best MDM solutions feature data visualization, making it easier to identify and fix data quality issues. Lastly, the best solution allows business users to design cleaner, simpler, and more flexible role-based user interfaces.
The Benefits of MDM
Harnessing the full power of data comes with plenty of benefits. For organizations to provide personalized cross-sell and up-sell offers, they need completeness of vision of customer touchpoints. MDM offers a consolidated source of all key customer, product, and relationship data. An accurate data source increases revenue growth by responding to customers on their channels of choice. Having a better understanding of customers helps businesses ensure they send the right cross-sell and up-sell offers.
Master data management eliminates IT overhead and costs while driving operational efficiencies by providing a complete, consistent, and reliable source of essential business data across the organization. It also improves visibility and control over business activities by managing relationships across products, customers, vendors, and locations. Master data management offers a central view of product information management, including accurate inventory information, product returns, and out-of-stock items across the supply chain. This improves inventory management, forecasting, and customer service. Organizations can ensure that accurate and timely information is supplied to support business decisions and actions made by the applications, processes, and people within the business.
Master data management speeds up the time-to-insight and action of organizations by allowing users to directly access, manage, and visually interact with key business data. Having a centralized source of product, customer, and vendor data makes it easier and faster to introduce new products and services. MDM helps businesses accelerate customer loyalty and boost sales by personalizing customer interactions, delivering a consistent customer experience across all channels, and tailoring products and services to the specific needs and wants of customers.
Finally, master data management helps reduce the costs of data compliance reporting and penalties. There are fewer vendor and product compliance issues with MDM, which leads to faster new product introductions and vendor onboarding.
