Are you looking to drive better, faster analytics and insights by identifying conflicting or redundant customer information across enterprise applications? Do you want to reduce the time and effort needed for data stewardship by improving the accuracy of automated merging processes? Has a merger or acquisition in the recent past led to disconnected data sources?
Get a 720 degree view of your customers, products, suppliers with Master Data Management. There are a plethora of Master Data Management solutions available in the market today. Informatica and Orchestra Networks have been named leaders in this space in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions. But before you go ahead to fixing on a platform, here are 4 aspects you need to define:
1. The Business Problem to be solved
Be Specific about what isn’t working clearly and concisely, so as to know exactly what is to be fixed. There is no point going out looking for a solution if the problem is not central to your business or you see so significant benefit in solving it. Ensure that you have clearly identified the specific impact the project should have in terms of business results to be measured throughout the entire project.
2. The Data you require
These are all the new subject areas about the customer that matter for the business and would be needed to feed the customer profiles. For example, we may need data about the products, employees, retail locations, branches, channels, and distribution partners to enrich the understanding of the customers and the business they do with the company. To fulfil the goal of using the customer profiles to improve the quality of cross-sell and upsell recommendations, clean, consistent, and connected data on products is needed to determine customers’ past purchases.
3. Your Data sources
Particularly the ones that are going to be used for enriching the Customer Gold Record. Example, external data sources like third-party data providers for demographics, income, education level, and the social networks that the customers are using.
4. Your Target Applications
Once the foundation of clean, consistent, and connected data would have been built, it needs to be shared with the business and analytical applications that run the business. To deliver great customer experiences, it is important that the customer profiles fuel target applications like CRM, the point of sale, customer service help-desk, campaign management, and marketing analytics. It’s the only way to make sure everybody’s working with great customer data that’s come from a single trusted source of truth.
Once you have these four in place, you can good to go ahead and evaluate the best-fit Master Data Management Solution. Get in touch with us at analytics@teamcomputers.com to brainstorm on how to start your MDM journey.