I was speaking with Steve LoCastro from BDS and one of the things that he wanted to point out was how many different uses a Mid-Market organization can get in a single Master Data Management match project.
Mid-Market Master Data Management solutions are usually driven by one specific issue. We can’t get certain reports, we want ours reps to have a single customer view to up-sell and cross-sell, we have data quality problems, or other issues. Typically, however, once the Master Data Management system is starting to be put in place, the Mid-Market firm starts to realize that they can gain additional benefits that they never foresaw when the MDM project was first authorized. Sometimes, the “secondary” benefits become as important as the initial objective.
For example, a Mid-Market organization may have two databases that they want to synchronize such as a Communication System (like Outlook or Lotus Notes) and a CRM system. The challenge with synchronizing these separate data sources is that there are multiple representations of the same or related organizations and contacts within these two systems. The different ways that these multiple representations have been entered in to these separate data silos, such as abbreviations, incomplete information, spelling mistakes, etc., makes the synchronization even more difficult. Therefore, in order to sync these two systems up, a Master Data Management match focusing on Customer Data Integration needs to take place.
Once complete, the organization is now able to tell from the Master Data Management match project which records are in both systems and which records are in one system and not the other. With this information, the synchronization process can then be put in motion.
Additionally, by changing the way that the same Master Data Management match project is queried, information such as duplicate records, missing data elements, and other data quality issues can also be addressed on the same records at the same time the company is benefitting from the syncing of the two systems which was the initial goal. If there is other valuable reference data, data that is part of the data sets that are being matched but are not used in the match itself, then additional analytics can be performed, such as marketing analytics, all from the same Master Data Management match project.