Pro Tips To Choose Your Master Data Management Tool

Overview

If you ask enterprise decision-makers about why business intelligence projects fail, data issues will be among the most common reasons.

Business transformation often faces the challenge of obtaining data in compatible formats from various industries. This creates information gaps, data silos, and long-standing communication problems between departments. To keep your data initiatives productive, an organization needs to maintain an accurate, consistent, and uniform master data program.

Organizations are constantly striving for ways to streamline data and business processes to support growing operations. Even after all the uncountable efforts, organizations fail to get the expected results. This is due to inaccurate master data. Master Data Management (MDM) helps companies streamline business processes and improve data quality to drive improved decision-making.

An efficient Master Data Management (MDM) tool supports organizations by storing disparate data and enriching, reconciling, merging, and managing this data from a central system. This enables enterprises to acquire and access clean, consistent data in line with larger business goals such as cost efficiency, improved data quality, faster product launches, and efficient regulatory compliance. It offers all the capabilities of data integration, quality, profiling, mastering, and management.

With a plethora of MDM tools in the market, opting for an off-the-shelf solution seems the obvious choice. But will it be the right decision for your enterprise?

With so many varying requirements, overlooking key considerations would be a mistake. This blog highlights Five areas that will help you make an informed decision. Whatever your choice, it will need some amount of customization to be in synchronization with your digital infrastructure and business objectives. How do you select an MDM solution that fits in well with your plan?

Let us dive into the key characteristics that will help you to choose the right Master Data Management software for your organization.

How to choose the right Master Data Management software

Internal audits provide key indicators related to an organization’s current health and unique requirements. Similarly, auditing an Master Data Management platform can clarify the value it has to offer. Key points to consider when considering an MDM platform are:

The platform must be horizontally and vertically scalable for each organization department as the business grows. Horizontal and vertical scalability in simple words is the ability to adapt to changes over time and grow as efficiently as possible. As the industry is constantly growing, long-term success requires the necessary data framework to accommodate these changes. If your Master Data Management solution is scalable, your business will easily adapt to the heavy load of data as our business grows.

It must be flexible and adaptable to changing business needs. A flexible data model is a key feature of the Master Data Management product of your choice. Depending on the domain where it is deployed, changes will be made to the model. Many vendors offer a ready-made template, but you may need to modify it to meet your specific needs. Choose these modifiers carefully, keeping in mind the long-term use of data elements. An inactive and ambiguous master data model would only aggravate existing problems. It is very necessary to look for an Master Data Management tool for your business that is future-ready for upcoming business challenges and harmlessly adapts to the changes.

The Master Data Management solution must support all architectural constructs including integration, registration, centralization, coexistence, and hybridization. The star architecture is a very popular approach and provides a single unified store of different referential data entities. The key benefit of this architecture is the ability to provide a complete and accurate enterprise-wide view (often referred to as a “360-degree view” or a “single view of truth”) for clients, and different master data domains.

Implementing MDM requires profound changes in the way organizations operate, partly because the technologies adopted here are relatively new and mainly because of the cultural challenges MDM poses for most organizations. When a company implements a Master Data Management hub, it is building a system that will be imprinted across all departments and lines of business in the organization.

Flexible deployment options such as on-premises, cloud, and Master Data Management-as-a-Service should be available. Choosing between cloud, on-premises, and Master Data Management-as-a-Service is an important decision for businesses. But there is no single deployment model that works for all organizations. While the cloud approached and surpassed on-premises solutions earlier this decade, the best choice for an enterprise still depends on the unique needs and requirements of the business.

Flexible deployment options such as on-premises, cloud, and MDM-as-a-Service should be available. Choosing between cloud, on-premises and MDM-as-a-Service is an important decision for businesses. But there is no single deployment model that works for all organizations. While the cloud approached and surpassed on-premises solutions earlier this decade, the best choice for an enterprise still depends on the unique needs and requirements of the business.

Deciding between one or the other implementation model is a complex process in which several factors are considered. To make informed decisions, organizations need to understand the difference between on-premises and cloud deployments and their place in their master data management strategy.

Low cost of ownership must be ensured through open integration for flexibility and rapid in a variety of customer environments. The total cost of ownership (TCO) is the purchase price of an asset plus operating costs. Assessing the total cost of ownership gives you an overview of your product and its value over time.

When choosing between alternatives in a purchasing decision, the buyer must consider not only the purchase price but also its long-term price, which is the total cost of ownership. These are the expenses incurred across the product lifecycle at any organization. The item with the lowest total cost of ownership is the one with the best long-term value.

Licensing and pricing models must be scalable when deploying an MDM solution. Upgradeable licenses & pricing models work best for businesses that experience workforce or sales fluctuations throughout the year. Compared to traditional licensing, cloud-based user licensing can make it easier to add new users for things like opening a second office or increasing workforce needs.

Looking Ahead

Enterprise data is evolving rapidly and you need a flexible and scalable solution to manage and analyze it. Selecting the right Master Data Management tool is a strategic decision with the potential to impact your business intelligence capabilities. Any mis-step can have costly aftereffects.

At Compunnel, we understand the importance of choosing the right technology to support your business goals. We build easy-to-use and scalable solutions that enable organizations to extract greater value out of their data.

Are you looking for help in defining an effective enterprise data management and governance strategy? Get in touch with us to discover how our experts will tailor a strategy aligned with your data and business objectives.