Modern day business users need consistent and accurate information to make operational, tactical, and strategic decisions. Enriched, accurate, and real-time information is the most critical piece of a strong analysis.
Though the list may vary a little from company to company, some of the most common master data entities are customers, products, employees, suppliers, and vendors. Organizations today have multiple sources for the same information, either due to different applications and products by different vendors—which generate duplicate data—or from as a result of an acquisition or merger with other companies. The key is to create a single, clean, accurate, and unified view of master data that can be shared with all applications.
The Importance of Master Data Management
Most of us utilize more than one product with a bank such as a credit card, mortgage, savings account, checking account, etc. However, there are many instances in which it is apparent that the bank customer service agent providing assistance does not have visibility to a complete picture of our information.
There have been numerous times when I have received new credit card offers in the mail from the bank, through which I already use the same credit card product. This makes me wonder how much money these banks could save, while also improving their service, if they had a complete view of my relationship with the bank. If all the departments within a bank—such as marketing, customer service, products, credit card division, collections, and recoveries—shared the same master data they will benefit in many ways:
- Ability to cross-sell or up-sell products that align with the customer’s behavioral use of products
- Retain customers by providing excellent customer service
- Cost savings for marketing campaigns due to a reduction in erroneous/incomplete data
- Offer the right product to avoid any losses
Now, lets consider retail and manufacturing companies, which offer a variety of products in different categories and geographies. The organizations are faced with the challenge of managing accurate product information globally. In the world of omni-channel retail and manufacturing, companies have to streamline product availability, pricing, and promotions across these many channels. At the same time, these companies need to enhance customer experience and encourage customer loyalty. To stay ahead of competition they need to offer the right product, to the right customer, at the right time, through the right channel. To achieve this competitive advantage not only do they need to have accurate product and customer information, but additionally they need to be able to combine product master data with customer master data. A unified multidomain MDM platform is the solution to all of these requirements.
A Unified MDM Platform Delivers Unique Capabilities
Most MDM solution providers offer separate solutions to master a single data domain, whereas TIBCO MDM provides a unified platform that delivers unique multi-domain capabilities to support a broad functional spectrum between customer and product data. A unified multi-domain MDM platform not only provides a single source of critical data domains—such as product, customer, and supplier—but also offers a cross relationship view between these different data domains.
Almost all companies start their MDM initiative with a scope of managing a single domain, typically the customer or product domain. Later, when they want to expand an MDM initiative, they will need a unified MDM platform that can serve a wide variety of use cases. TIBCO MDM offers the flexibility to expand your master data initiative in a single MDM platform at the pace your business needs.
Even if your MDM scope is currently limited, it’s a smart decision to implement a unified multidomain solution as it will save time in the long run by avoiding the buying cycle process again. Implementing multiple different master data managements for different use cases will compromise the main reason of the MDM project.
Remember, one of the main purposes of master data management is to remove data silos within the company—not to increase them. Recently, Gartner released two Magic Quadrant reports for MDM of Customer Data and MDM of Product Data. TIBCO is positioned as a Leader in both the magic quadrants.
