Master Data Management

If data is distributed across various databases it becomes difficult to manage. Datactics consolidates these data providing accurate and consistent master data.

83% of organizations suffer from poor master data¹.

Master data is the lifeblood of your organization. It underpins every part of your operation from manufacturing purchasing and logistics to distribution, finance and sales & marketing. If not managed effectively your data will very quickly become inaccurate and inconsistent especially if your operational data is distributed across various databases in numerous business units.

It is estimated that 30% of product data in retailer and manufacturer catalogs is out of date². Whole production lines can grind to a halt – at enormous cost to your business – because of common ‘errors’ such as a crucial part being entered in the wrong description field which the system therefore does not recognize. In reality this doesn’t happen as most organizations invest heavily in manual resources to rectify poor master data; large numbers of staff are employed to correct purchase orders, rectify product and part information, address pricing errors, adjust invoices and reconcile deductions to remittances.  This is, of course, not the optimized use of these employees – they are simply acting as ‘sticking plasters’ on top of inaccurate data rather than delivering true value for the organization.

Master your data, Master your business.

Key steps to ensure your master data is reliable and complete include:

• Create a centralized mechanism
• Cleanse
• Transform and standardize 
• Enrich
• Validate

But the complexity and volume of your data may mean effective master data management is outside the scope of your own IT department, and requires specialist external support and technology.

Datactics specializes in helping with master data management – quickly and cost effectively. We can help ensure that:

• You are not wasting resource by entering the same information repeatedly and inconsistently – potentially rendering it useless.
• You are able to reconcile data even in highly complex cases following a data merge, for example, where the databases of two or more organizations need to be integrated.
• You improve your customer service, efficiency and compliance with legislation and regulations by aligning multiple databases.
• Different business units are able to communicate via a central hub of accurate and timely data, allowing them to join forces to negotiate improved supply terms.
• You can quickly and easily identify synergies to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling. 

Datactics has created a White Paper on Master Data Management to provide a detailed insight into our approach in this area.

If Master Data Management ( MDM ) is of interest to you please look at the following Case Studies which highlight the real results achieved by organizations dealing with this challenge –

• The Bank of Ireland offers a broad range of services to its customers.  It had a need to create a ‘single view of customer’ by combining data from many internal systems.  Using Datactics they cleansed the data, removing inaccuracies and duplications and created a ‘golden record’ for each customer.

• Increased Response is a database marketing consultancy that had over 200 million records, merged from 5 different sources.  Datactics imported, enhanced and de-duplicated the consumer data finding that 53% of all records had some form of duplication or inaccuracy.

• An Asian Trade development Council had an urgent need to replace an outdated, manual process of maintaining data.  Datactics was able to handle the de-duplication and cleansing of the data – which consisted of all variations of Chinese characters and other Asian languages – within the same data sets.  This unique capability enabled the Council to reduce the time taken in the process from months to days.  

¹ The Data Warehousing Institute (TWDI)

² A.T.Kearney