Master data management (MDM) has emerged as an important aspect of all ERP implementation or consolidation exercises. With ever evolving and increasing inventory, supplier, product and customer databases, it has become essential to cleanse and maintain the quality of the master data.
All MDM initiatives have two parts one, historical data cleansing and two, ongoing data management (Master Data Governance). Most of the companies think MDM as a cleansing and consolidating initiative but the bigger challenge lies in ensuring the quality of data on an ongoing basis.
In order to keep the cleansed data clean, it is imperative to adopt an effective and efficient ongoing data management (ODM) tool. Managing data on a continuous basis is fraught with challenges that are unique to this part of an MDM initiative. It has to address both the legacy data as well as new data issues in the same manner. It is a point of convergence for people, technology and process in order to manage the crucial data (information) of an enterprise.
This is a vital link in the overall ODM process for it maintains the quality of data and makes it available to a wide range of decision making hierarchy across an organization. In other words, Master Data Governance is the complete management of the availability, utilization and security of the data in a company.
Master Data Governance also signals the symbiotic existence of IT and business so as to improve the overall process. It unifies the compartmentalized information across various departments in an organization to boost data sharing by all concerned. The information sharing results in advantages such as:
1. Revenue growth
2. Cost rationalization
3. Inventory optimization
4. Vendor rationalization
5. Visibility enhancement
6. Greater process compliance
The rising number of M&As and business expansions further strengthens the need for most of the companies to undertake an MDM project. These developments contribute to the data muddle in an enterprise. Some of the common hurdles faced by these organizations include:
1. Plants in multiple locations
2. Multiple legacy systems
3. Multiple user groups across locations
4. Multiple taxonomies across plants
5. Huge data size for material, vendor, product, etc
6. Data in multiple languages
In a scenario like this MDM becomes essential to the success and survival of the business in the long-term.
Master Data Governance is a decisive factor in an MDM project because of two reasons:
First, it monitors complete compliance both internally and externally. From the internal perspective, DGM allows the requisitioners, local data managers and master data managers to view the entire data creation process and take suitable corrective action as and when necessary. This is besides overall monitoring of the material, product and vendor information in the master data.
Second, an effective DGM can drastically reduce the threat to a consolidated master data repository. By bestowing data stewardship, it controls access to the critical master data. As result any change in existing data or creation of new data can be tracked and monitored at all times.
With rapidly growing businesses and M&As, global enterprises are finding it difficult to maintain the quality of their centralized data. While this holds true for companies across all sectors, it is a particularly hard for those from manufacturing, oil & gas, utilities and mining industries.
According to various estimates, demand for MDM solutions has increased in the range of 30-45 percent CAGR. This figure is even higher for companies in the manufacturing, oil & gas, utilities and mining sectors. These estimates also peg the market size for MDM to touch around $1.6 billion by 2012 growing at an average of 16 percent CAGR. The overall market includes PIM, PLM, CDI, Data Migration, besides core MDM initiatives.
Creating accurate master data and managing it consistently are challenges that no enterprise can afford to ignore. When your business runs on information, it needs a solid foundation of data it can rely on. Thats one of the reasons why companies have started investing on Master Data Governance heavily to safeguard their data integrity.Without that, the organizations performance and success are at risk.
