Workflow management has become a core requirement for organizations on the look for a Master Data Management (MDM) and/or Product Data Management (PIM) solution.

In the early days of MDM solutions, these applications were often integrated with a third-party workflow engine, but today it has become most common that the workflow management capability is built-in and comes as a – sometimes extra charged – native part of the solution.

The approval process for onboarding master data entities is the most frequent use case for building a master data workflow. However, we increasingly see other use cases addressed, not at least data quality checks (which also supports the approval process).

For party master data (customer and other roles) some examples of workflow elements are:

• Duplicate check and eventual succeeding master data survivorship settlement
• Blacklist check
• Credit check and approval

For product master data some examples are:

• Completeness check for various stages (sellable, catalogue ready, online ready)
• Compliance check and approval
• Pricing approval

Below are a few examples on how MDM/PIM vendors promote and explain their workflow offering:

The examples are taken from the Contentserv MDM, Dynamicweb PIM, Reltio workflow & collaboration and Semarchy xDM pages.