Master Data Management
INTRODUCTION
Fragmented inconsistent Product data slows time-to-market, creates supply chain
inefficiencies, results in weaker than expected market penetration, and drives up
the cost of compliance. Fragmented inconsistent Customer data hides revenue
recognition, introduces risk, creates sales inefficiencies, and results in misguided
marketing campaigns and lost customer loyalty
1
. “Product” and “Customer” are
only two of a large number of key business entities we refer to as Master Data.
Application fragmentation negatively impacts an organization’s ability to maintain
proper governance processes, mitigate risk, and provide accurate timely
compliance reports.
Master Data is the critical business information supporting the transactional and
analytical operations of the enterprise. Master Data Management (MDM) is a
combination of applications and technologies that consolidates, cleans, and
augments this corporate master data, and synchronizes it with all applications,
business processes, and analytical tools. This results in significant improvements in
operational efficiency, reporting, and fact based decision-making.
Over the last several decades, IT landscapes have grown into complex arrays of
different systems, applications, and technologies. This fragmented environment
has created significant data problems. These data problems are breaking business
processes; impeding Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) initiatives;
corrupting analytics; and costing corporations billions of dollars a year. MDM
attacks the enterprise data quality problem at its source on the operational side of
the business. This is done in a coordinated fashion with the data warehousing /
analytical side of the business. This combined approach is proving itself to be very
successful in leading companies around the world.
This paper will discuss what it means to ‘manage’ master data and outlines Oracle’s
MDM solution. Oracle’s technology components are ideal for building master data
management systems, and Oracle’s pre-built MDM solutions for key master data
objects such as Product and Customer can bring real business value in a fraction of
the time it takes to build from scratch. Oracle’s fusion of applications and
technology creates a solution superior to other MDM offerings on the market.
OVERVIEW
How do you get from a thousand points of data entry to a single view of the
business? This is the challenge that has faced companies for many years. Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) is helping to automate business processes across
disparate applications, but the data fragmentation remains. Modern business
analytics on top of terabyte sized data warehouses are producing ever more
1
Customer Data Integration – Reaching a Single Version of the Truth, Jill Dyche, Evan Levy Wiley & Sons,
2006
“Through 2010, 70 percent of Fortune 1000
organizations will apply MDM programs to
ensure the accuracy and integrity of commonly
shared business information for compliance,
operational efficiency and competitive
differentiation purposes (0.7 probability).”
Gartner, Jan. 2006
