Cloud MDM – A Phased Approach to Success

The goal of master data management (MDM) is to create a centralized set of trusted data that an organization can rely on to drive business initiatives such as customer experience, digital commerce, supply chain optimization, and financial reporting and compliance. It ties all your systems and information together. MDM enables your organization to maximize your data to generate the most significant business impact at scale.

One key aspect of any technology strategy is implementation. Organizations rarely implement MDM to address all domains and use cases at once. Many implementations fail to deliver value in the stipulated time because teams try to handle all of the data challenges at once, without prioritizing the most pressing issues first. Taking on an MDM strategy all at once may result in delays, higher-than-expected costs, loss of productivity, and result in a drain on IT resources.

The best practice is to follow a phased approach, one that begins with the simpler use cases and works up to the more complex data challenges which impact every function. A modern, cloud-native MDM solution should support this type of phased approach, so you can move through each iteration seamlessly as your requirements change and grow.

An all-in-one MDM solution designed to support enterprise-scale needs can help you manage every domain—customer, account, employee, supplier, distributor, product, material, location, and reference data—in a single solution. The solution also manages the interconnections between domains such as person-to-person relationships and organization hierarchies to help you gain a complete 360-degree view of the business across the enterprise.

Organizations can take many different ways to implement MDM in a phased manner. Some examples are:

Many cloud MDM solutions in the market offer departmental solutions that don’t scale to address enterprise requirements. While they may help address narrow use cases today, they can’t scale and require significant customizations to address more than one use case.

A flexible, cloud-native, all-in-one MDM solution that grows with you can help you create an enterprise-wide view of all data domains. It will allow for modularity and lets you start with a domain of your choice and expand to other data types at your pace, without needed to rip and replace. It can scale to address data volumes across many sources. It can handle various use cases around customer loyalty, digital commerce, supply chain resiliency, finance data management, and more.

To ensure MDM success, consider the following tips:

• Break down the initiative into smaller, achievable steps that provide quick wins
• Define a measurable outcome that you can articulate for each step
• Build a roadmap of use cases that allow you the flexibility to adjust to changing business needs yet deliver value
• Have your eyes on the big picture by documenting any 3 – 5-year goals

Read more about how to Redefine Modern Master Data Management in the Cloud in this eBook.