Which is the one secret ingredient that super-successful, top-performing companies have in common?

It is a powerful Master Data Management (MDM) system.

Global research shows that over 95% of the top-performing companies empower their leaders and management with a technology backed approach to data utilization, integration, and management. The rest of the companies are realizing the potential of MDM in supporting customer-centric, modern digital ecosystems, and will become ardent adopters very soon.

Improve Business Performance

A centralized, well-integrated MDM system enhances a company’s ability to extract maximum business value from data and make accurate insight-driven decisions while slashing cost and effort. It helps businesses to continuously improve operational efficiencies, enhance customer engagement and experience, reduce TCO, and boost RoI.

MDM defends and harmonizes enterprise data, slays duplicates, augments data efficiency, and thwarts leakage of sensitive information, redundancies, and errors. Strategizing product launches, marketing campaigns, and geographical expansions are a breeze with MDM insights.  Its application-agnostic, intelligent, and scalable architecture supports seamless integration of product data, customer data, financial data, employee data, and other enterprise information to fuel incredible insights and performance.

Read: Know the unknowable by mastering customer, product, and supplier master data

Tame the Data Beast

With over 1.145 trillion megabytes of data generated every day, it is imperative for companies to implement a robust master data management system, to tame the feral data.  Consumable data usually comes in structured and unstructured forms. Structured data are those from internal systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Resource Management (CRM), and financial records. In contrast, unstructured data is generated from IoT machines, social networks, third-party databases, and other unconventional sources. Today over 90% of data received is unstructured and informal in nature.

To survive this savage data deluge, enterprises must invest in a powerful MDM system.  The master data management system will help the businesses to capture the right data, cleanse and streamline data, and transform raw data into insights that drive better decision making. It delivers superior data quality, enhanced fluidity, and quick accessibility and distribution of data. By breaking down data complexity, disparity, and silos, and creating a single version of the truth, MDM serves as an efficient decision-making tool for businesses.

Best Practices in MDM implementation

Without a proper MDM in place, all data initiatives can be daunting in size, cost, effort, resource, time, and complexity.  However, recent MDM infrastructures, architectures, applications, and capabilities have kept pace to lower initial cost, resolve data integration and quality issues, and boost business process management. A well-implemented MDM system eliminates the hitches in data accessibility, security, integrity, and fidelity. It offers flexible implementation styles that can help businesses customize MDM installation and scale as required.

Want to transform your business into a top performer?  Then, derive the utmost value from your MDM implementation by following the best practices below.

Take a Phased Roadmap Approach

MDM is not a short-term project or a program. It is an ongoing journey that needs a phased approach to deliver incremental business value. A pragmatic roadmap with a detailed plan on sequential action points, resource requirements, benefits, and costing will provide an edge to MDM implementation.

Ensure Metadata Quality

Metadata quality is crucial if the organization wants to understand master data. It provides information about the data collected by answering questions such as what, where, why, when, and how. Detailed metadata is essential for businesses to generate better insight and prevent issues in data ingestion and retrieval.

Focus on ROI and Continuous Improvement

Right from the initial phase to the post-implementation stage, businesses must emphasize continuous improvement and the RoI component.  Periodic quality audits are a necessity to ensure process improvements and compliance with data quality and security policies.

Leverage Metrics and Dashboards

Metrics play a vital role in measuring business progress. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of MDM must be measured and tracked on dashboards to see if the quality levels, regulatory compliances, exception remediation rates, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) adherence are maintained.

Don’t Forget Architectural Consultancy

MDM architectures come with their pros and cons. Ensure you consult your MDM service provider to choose the right architecture that suits your product/service and purpose.

Integrate Seamlessly with Enterprise and External Apps

While implementing MDM, businesses must ensure seamless integration with enterprise applications, relevant distribution outlets, and third-party data providers. Only then can business leaders, customers, and other stakeholders access data and utilize the derived insights at the right time.

Focus on Data Governance

Prioritizing data governance is imperative to reduce the security risks associated with data access, tampering, and seepage.  Top-down data stewardship teams are perfect for ensuring that data is stored, cleansed, and backed up against threats such as internal inefficiencies, data theft, and cyber-attacks.

Emphasize on Collaboration and Training

MDM implementation is a cross-functional pursuit. Employees across departments such as IT, product, marketing, HR, finance, and supply chain must collaborate to share relevant data and ensure its quality. Businesses must train the cross-functional teams to use the MDM system optimally.

Right access to the right information at the right time plays a significant role in boosting business performance. Proficient insight-driven decisions enabled by a powerful MDM system is what differentiates a top-performing company from a mediocre one.

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