Monday, 22 July 2013

Ifs and Buts of Master Data Management


According to a recent conversation on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), SaaS (Software as a Service) and mergers and acquisitions have made the creating and maintaining of a precise and apt master data a business acute and insistent. In this post, you will come across many reasons behind adopting master data management solutions and how the process of building a solution can help in the technological implementation and efficiency of the solution. The mere truth is that firms and organizations have been experiencing these days around regulatory compliance, consistent reporting, and a strong deviation towards SOA and SaaS has ignited a great interest in MDM Pharma . Explaining and depicting the importance of MDM, it will help in identifying some of the basics of master data management patterns and the best practices that are evolving. Drilling down into the technical as well as procedural issues involved in master data management, most of the software systems have huge lists of data used, accessed and shared by varied applications that makes up the system. Just for example – a typical ERP system has a customer data, an account master and an item master. Been one of the major assets of any company, master data is not unusual for an enterprise to be obtained primarily to have access to its related customer master data.

Need for managing MDM
As master data is used by multiple applications, a flaw in it can really cause errors in all the applications that use it. Example, an incorrect thing could represent flaws in bills, orders and marketing literature in customer master, all being sent to the wrong address. Even if the master data has no issues, most of the organizations still use just one set of master data. Many firms and enterprises grew through mergers and acquisitions. Each firm you obtain comes with its own master data, item master, customer master and so forth. In many cases, part numbers and customer numbers are addressed by the software that builds the master records, so that the chances of same product or customer having similar kind of identifier in both databases is private and outlandish. Item masters could be even hard to consolidate, especially if the varied parts are bought from different vendors having different vendor numbers. Integrating and merging of master data lists could be a troublesome job to do. The same customer could have different names, addresses, customer numbers, and phone numbers in different databases. Normal database searches and joins would not be able to solve such differences and demands a very diligent and advanced form of tool that acknowledges nick names, typing errors and alternate spellings. The tool must have to reckon and admit that different name variations need to be resolved even if they all are having the same phone number and address. Cleaning up an entire master list can be a baffling job but still there are many positive advantages rendered to your bottom line from a common master list.

·         A unique, single and consolidated bill improves user satisfaction as well as save money.
·         Sending up the same marketing strategy to all customers from multiple customer lists not only irritates the customer but also waste money.
·         Stocking up the same item under distinct part numbers is not only a waste of money along with the shelf space, but could highly drive to artificial shortages.

The recent discussion towards SaaS and SOA makes master data management a severe issue. And, for all such reasons, maintaining a consistent and premium quality set of master data for your enterprise is instantly becoming the need of the hour. In addition, the processes and systems needed to maintain such data is highly well known as master data management. Moreover, MDM phar006Da acknowledges different tools and techniques for using and managing master data covering single copy approach, multiple copies approach needing single maintenance, and continuous merge approach. And, all such things could be easily planned out and dealt with making customers life easy and simple at the expense of a more critical infrastructure to sustain and work for data stewards. And, it could be an acceptable and favorable trade-off that should be done and addressed consciously.

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