Tag Archives: PDS

Nine Essential Master Data Processes in The Data Supply Chain

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Master Data Management (MDM) and the overlapping Product Information Management (PIM) discipline is the centre of which the end-to-end data supply chain revolves around in enterprises that produce and/or sell goods.

Nine essential master data processes are:

1: Onboard Customer Data

It starts and ends with the King: The Customer. Your organization will probably have several touchpoints where customer data is captured. MDM was born out of the Customer Data Integration (CDI) discipline and a main reason of being for MDM is still to be a place where all customer data is gathered as exemplified in the post Direct Customers vs Indirect Customers.

2: Onboard Vendor Data

Every organization has vendors/suppliers who delivers direct and indirect products as office supplies, Maintenance, Repair and Operation (MRO) parts, raw materials, packing materials, resell products and services as well. As told in a post on this blog, you have to Know Your Supplier.

3: Enrich Party Data

There are good options for not having to collect all data about your customers and vendors yourself, as there are 3rd party sources available for enriching these data preferable as close to capture as possible. This topic was examined in the post Third-Party Data and MDM.

4: Onboard Product Data

While a small portion of product data for a small portion of product groups can be obtained via product data pools, the predominant way is to have product data coming in as second party data from each vendor/supplier. This process is elaborated in the post 4 Supplier Product Data Onboarding Scenarios.

5: Transform Product Data

As your organization probably do not use the same standard, taxonomy, and structure for product data as all your suppliers, you have to transform the data into your standard, taxonomy, and structure. You may do the onboarding and transformation in one go as pondered in the post The Role of Product Data Syndication in Interenterprise MDM.

6: Consolidate Product Data

If your organization produce products or you combine external and internal products and services in other ways you must consolidate the data describing your finished products and services.

7: Enrich Product Data

Besides the hard facts about the products and services you sell you must also apply competitive descriptions of the products and services that makes you stand out from the crowd and ensure that the customer will buy from you when looking for products and services for a given purpose of use.

8: Customize Product Data

Product data will optimally have to be tailored for a given geography, market and/or channel. This includes language and culture considerations and adhering to relevant regulations.

9: Personalize Product Data

Personalization is one step deeper than market and channel customization. Here you at point-of-sale seek to deliver the right Customer Experience (CX) by exercising Product eXperience Management (PXM). Here you combine customer data and product data. This quest was touched in the post What is Contextual MDM?

What is MDM? – and the Adjacent Disciplines?

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This site is list of solutions for MDM and the disciplines adjacent to MDM. As always, it is good to have a definition of what we are talking about. So, here are some definitions of MDM and an Introduction to 9 adjacent disciplines:

Def MDM

MDM: Master Data Management can be defined as a comprehensive method of enabling an enterprise to link all of its critical data to a common point of reference. When properly done, MDM improves data quality, while streamlining data sharing across personnel and departments. In addition, MDM can facilitate computing in multiple system architectures, platforms and applications. You can find the source of this definition and 3 other – somewhat similar – definitions in the post 4 MDM Definitions: Which One is the Best?

The most addressed master data domains are parties encompassing customer, supplier and employee roles, things as products and assets as well as location.

Def PIM

PIM: Product Information Management is a discipline that overlaps MDM. In PIM you focus on product master data and a long tail of specific product information – often called attributes – that is needed for a given classification of products.

Furthermore, PIM deals with how products are related as for example accessories, replacements and spare parts as well as the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities there are between products.

PIM also handles how products have digital assets attached.

This data is used in omni-channel scenarios to ensure that the products you sell are presented with consistent, complete and accurate data. Learn more in the post Five Product Information Management Core Aspects.

Def DAM

DAM: Digital Asset Management is about handling extended features of digital assets often related to master data and especially product information. The digital assets can be photos of people and places, product images, line drawings, certificates, brochures, videos and much more.

Within DAM you are able to apply tags to digital assets, you can convert between the various file formats and you can keep track of the different format variants – like sizes – of a digital asset.

You can learn more about how these first 3 mentioned TLAs are connected in the post How MDM, PIM and DAM Stick Together.

Def DQM

DQM: Data Quality Management is dealing with assessing and improving the quality of data in order to make your business more competitive. It is about making data fit for the intended (multiple) purpose(s) of use which most often is best to achieved by real-world alignment. It is about people, processes and technology. When it comes to technology there are different implementations as told in the post DQM Tools In and Around MDM Tools.

The most used technologies in data quality management are data profiling, that measures what the data stored looks like, and data matching, that links data records that do not have the same values, but describes the same real world entity.

Def RDM

RDM: Reference Data Management encompass those typically smaller lists of data records that are referenced by master data and transaction data. These lists do not change often. They tend to be externally defined but can also be internally defined within each organization.

Examples of reference data are hierarchies of location references as countries, states/provinces and postal codes, different industry code systems and how they map and the many product classification systems to choose from.

Learn more in the post What is Reference Data Management (RDM)?

Def CDI

CDI: Customer Data Integration is considered as the predecessor to MDM, as the first MDMish solutions focused on federating customer master data handled in multiple applications across the IT landscape within an enterprise.

The most addressed sources with customer master data are CRM applications and ERP applications, however most enterprises have several of other applications where customer master data are captured.

You may ask: What Happened to CDI?

Def CDP

CDP: Customer Data Platform is an emerging kind of solution that provides a centralized registry of all data related to parties regarded as (prospective) customers at an enterprise.

In that way CDP goes far beyond customer master data by encompassing traditional transaction data related to customers and the emerging big data sources too.

Right now, we see such solutions coming both from MDM solution vendors and CRM vendors as reported in the post CDP: Is that part of CRM or MDM?

Def ADM

ADM: Application Data Management is about not just master data, but all critical data that is somehow shared between personel and departments. In that sense MDM covers all master within an organization and ADM covers all (critical) data in a given application and the intersection is looking at master data in a given application.

ADM is an emerging term and we still do not have a well-defined market – if there ever will be one – as examined in the post Who are the ADM Solution Providers?

Def PXM

PXM: Product eXperience Management is another emerging term that describes a trend to positioning PIM solutions away from the MDM flavour and more towards digital experience / customer experience themes.

In PXM the focus is on personalization of product information, Search Engine Optimization and exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) in those quests.

Read more about it in the post What is PxM?

Def PDS

PDS: Product Data Syndication connects MDM, PIM (and other) solutions at each trading partner with each other within business ecosystems. Product data syndication is often the first wave of encompassing interenterprise data sharing. You can get the details in the post What is Product Data Syndication (PDS)?

The Rise of Interenterprise MDM

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The recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions has this strategic planning assumption:

“By 2023, organizations with shared ontology, semantics, governance and stewardship processes to enable interenterprise data sharing will outperform those that don’t.“

Interenterprise data sharing must be leveraged through interenterprise MDM, where master data are shared between many companies as for example in supply chains. The evolution of interenterprise MDM and the current state of the discipline was touched in the post MDM Terms In and Out of The Gartner 2020 Hype Cycle.

In the 00’s the evolution of Master Data Management (MDM) started with single domain / departmental solutions dominated by Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Product Information Management (PIM) implementations. These solutions were in best cases underpinned by third party data sources as business directories as for example the Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) world base and second party product information sources as for example the GS1 Global Data Syndication Network (GDSN).

In the previous decade multidomain MDM with enterprise-wide coverage became the norm. Here the solution typically encompasses customer-, vendor/supplier-, product- and asset master data. Increasingly GDSN is supplemented by other forms of Product Data Syndication (PDS). Third party and second party sources are delivered in the form of Data as a Service that comes with each MDM solution.

In this decade we will see the rise of interenterprise MDM where the solutions to some extend become business ecosystem wide, meaning that you will increasingly share master data and possibly the MDM solutions with your business partners – or else you will fade in the wake of the overwhelming data load you will have to handle yourself.

Contextual MDM vs Enterprise-Wide, Global, Multidomain MDM

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The term “contextual Master Data Management” has been floating around in a couple of years. We can see contextual MDM as smaller pieces of MDM with a given flavour as for example focussing on sub/overlapping disciplines as:

The focus can also be at:

  • A given locality
  • A given master data domain as customer, supplier, employee, other/all party, product (beyond PIM), location or asset
  • A given business unit

You must eat an elephant one bite at a time. Therefore, contextual MDM makes a good concept for getting achievable wins.   

However, in an organization with high level of data management maturity the range of contextual MDM use cases, and the solutions for them, will be encompassed by a common enterprise-wide, global, multidomain MDM framework – either as one solution or a well-orchestrated set of solutions.

One example with dependencies is when working with personalization as part of Product Experience Management (PXM). Here you need customer personas. The elephant in the room, so to speak, is that you have to get the actual personas from Customer MDM and/or the Customer Data Platform (CDP).

The list of solutions on this site covers both one-stop-shopping options for all contextual MDM use cases and specialised solutions for a given contextual MDM use case. Check the growing list here.

MDM Terms In and Out of The Gartner 2020 Hype Cycle

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The latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Data and Analytics Governance and Master Data Management includes some of the MDM trends that have been touched here on the blog.

If we look at the post peak side, there are these five MDM terms in motion:

  • Single domain MDM represented by the two most common domains being MDM of Product Data and MDM of Customer Data. Doing Customer MDM and Product MDM is according to Gartner still going up the slope of enslightment towards the plateau of productivity.
  • Multidomain MDM solutions as examined here on this blog in the post What is Multidomain MDM?.According to Gartner there are still desillusions to be made for these solutions.
  • Cloud MDM as for example pondered in a guest blog post on this blog. The post is called Cloud multi-domain MDM as the foundation for Digital Transformation. There is still a long downhill journey for cloud MDM in the eyes of the Gartner folks.
  • Data Hub Strategy which my also be coined Extended MDM as a data hub covers more data than master data as reported in the post Master Data, Product Information, Reference Data and Other Data. This trend is trailing cloud MDM on the Gartner Hype Cycle.
  • Interenterprise MDM, which before was coined Multienterprise MDM by Gartner and I like to coin Ecosystem Wide MDM. An example of a kind of solution with this theme will be PDS as explained in the post What is Product Data Syndication (PDS)? This trend has, estimated by Gartner, just passed the peak and have more than 5 years before reaching the plateau of productivity.

It is also worth noticing that Gartner has dropped the term Multivector MDM from the hype cycle. This term never penetrated the market lingo.

Another term that is related to- or opposed to– MDM and that is almost only used by Gartner is Application Data Management (ADM). That term is still in there making the under most radars progress near the final uphill climb.

Learn more about how solution providers cover these terms on The Resource List.