Elevate your MDM Benefits through Data Integrity

Better data-driven decision-making, higher ROI, stronger compliance – what do all these outcomes have in common?

They rely on high-quality data.

But the truth is, it’s harder than ever for organizations to maintain that level of data quality. As your business applications grow, so do fragmented data silos that hold you back.

Think about your organization. How confident are you that your data management practices are up to the task of supporting your evolving objectives?

Multi-domain master data management (MDM) is key to breaking down those data silos and gaining one powerful, holistic view of data across all your hubs – providing a “golden record” of master data that supports informed, consistent, and contextually relevant decisions.

Let’s explore the power of master data management, and how data integrity helps you overcome common roadblocks and elevate the benefits of MDM in your business.

MDM: The Answer to Data Chaos

Imagine managing a sprawling organization where each department operates with its own datasets. For many, no imagination is required – it’s a tough reality. If that’s the case for you, have you ever encountered data discrepancies that led to operational hiccups or customer service nightmares?

That’s what makes multi-domain MDM so critical. Without MDM, inconsistencies like varying customer addresses or product descriptions across systems can create chaos. MDM integrates this critical data into one master source, creating a single point of reference, or the “golden record,” that ensures uniformity and reliability across your enterprise.

Integrating this data into a single source streamlines operations while enhancing data quality and consistency. So if you’re striving to be a more data-driven business, but struggling to do so with inconsistencies in your critical data domains, an MDM is a must.

Domains of Master Data: The Building Blocks of MDM

Master data encompasses various domains that collectively support your most critical business operations. Understanding these domains, and how your data fits into them, will help you craft a robust MDM framework that best suits your needs. Here are five of the most common:

1. Party master data: Everyone who interacts with the business and their relationship with it, including prospects, customers, suppliers, vendors, and employees.
2. Reference master data: List of values that provide context to master and transactional information. These are commonly accepted values, codes, and classifications across your organization that are critical to reporting and analysis. Examples include: country codes, state abbreviations, currency codes, industry/product classifications.
3. Location master data: Physical sites that support the business. This data covers geographical and spatial data related to an organization’s physical assets, including branch locations, distribution centers, etc. This domain also includes addresses, coordinates, zones, and other location-specific attributes that are essential for managing the operational footprint.
4. Financial master data: Reporting and accounting categories within the business, encompassing information related to financial transactions within the organizations. Example data includes chart of accounts (CoA), cost centers, and price lists.
5. Revenue sources master data: A flexible category that represents what the business produces or manages and is adapted to your industry and business model. This master data encompasses an organization’s products, assets, and services.

A multi-domain MDM cross-references all these domains to drive business value. And that’s more important now than ever when today’s markets demand agility and pinpoint accuracy. With multi-domain MDM, you gain benefits like:

• faster insights and better decision-making with cross-domain intelligence to proactively surface insights that are needed to quickly respond to market changes.
• minimized risk and stronger compliance with greater data accuracy and data control to enforce necessary compliance processes– crucial for meeting regulatory requirements and minimizing risks.
• operational efficiency with reduced redundancies and manual data handling – which in turn lowers operational costs and helps enhance more seamless customer experiences that are now industry standard.

Overcoming Data Challenges: Beyond Basic Data Management

Even with the benefits of multi-domain MDM, there are still steps you need to take to address common challenges that can minimize its effectiveness. Here are a few top examples to keep in mind:

• Poor data literacy: Varying interpretations of data (think same name, different meanings) across departments can lead to inconsistencies and decision-making errors. You need to be equipped with the knowledge to interpret and use data correctly.
• Lack of data readiness: Struggles with data literacy often lead to data readiness issues. It’s not enough for data to be complete and conforming; it has to be trustworthy, timely, and seamlessly integrated.
• Data risk exposure: The downstream impacts of the two issues above continue – if your organization struggles with data literacy before an MDM, you’ll struggle to adequately trace data changes, decreasing your data protection and increasing risk to regulatory fines.
• Sustainability issues: Overly complex or incomplete processes can cause inefficiencies and errors – making your data management unsustainable in the long term.

How do you tackle these challenges head on and ensure a successful and adaptable MDM strategy? With a robust approach to data integrity.

Achieving Modern MDM through Data Integrity

The core of modern master data management lies in maintaining the highest standards of data integrity – that’s data with maximum accuracy, consistency, and context. With data integrity, you unlock:

Enterprise-wide understanding
A common challenge for many organizations – whether they grow organically or through acquisitions – is the lack of a unified understanding of data across the enterprise. To overcome this, you need to break down data silos that compromise data accuracy and trustworthiness.

A unified view ensures that every department works from the same accurate dataset, which enhances your operational efficiency and decision-making.

Data policy management
Data security and password protection are important, but measures like these are only a small part of the big picture of data policy management. To truly minimize risks and ensure compliance, you also need to define clear data policies and standards for “good” data. Then, you can effectively leverage automation to enforce these policies across your business.

Data fit for purpose
Understanding and governing crucial data across your enterprise is key to maintaining data integrity. Apply governance appropriately to ensure the relevancy and accuracy of data for specific business needs.

The ability to leverage cross-domain intelligence helps organizations to understand and leverage relationships between various data types across your business.

Data visibility is also essential to ensuring fit-for-purpose data – giving you insights into data origin, usage, and impact across business functions.

Data sustainability
Data sustainability is about understanding the complete lifecycle of data and preparing for future demands – like rapid scalability in the event of acquisitions or geographic expansion.

Ultimately, data sustainability is achieved and maintained when you have solid practices in place around what we’ve covered here – integration, automation, and understanding of your data’s full lifecycle. Together, this ensures that your data management systems have the integrity needed to keep them flexible and robust enough to handle new challenges without extensive rework.

The Best Solutions to Maximize MDM Benefits

With all this information in mind, your next question may be how to get started. It’s not just about equipping your business with an MDM solution – you also need to continuously evolve your data practices so that you’re maintaining data integrity.

And since every organization’s data integrity journey is different, you need a solution that meets you where you’re at. The Precisely Data Integrity Suite is a modular, interoperable suite of services that delivers accurate, consistent, and contextual data to the business wherever it is and it’s needed.

Pair these data integrity capabilities with the powerful MDM solution, EnterWorks, to unlock the aforementioned benefits of multi-domain MDM. You’ll be able to create your coveted “golden record” of data and deliver advanced insights fast, for timely, accurate, and consistent decision-making.

Take the Next Step in Mastering Your Data

Multi-domain MDM enables you to dismantle harmful data silos and maximize your data’s ROI across business objectives – transforming the way you operate and compete in an increasingly data-driven world.

To learn more and take the next step in your journey, read our eBook Master Data Management (MDM) Checklist: 3 Keys to Success.