Streamlining Metadata Workflows: Best Practices for Improved Data Management

Today’s enterprise-level finance departments are highly complex, relying on dozens of business process-specific applications to manage everything from accounts receivable to zero-based budgeting strategies.

Creating and maintaining data alignment across these applications requires a highly structured approach to data management, and streamlining several key financial metadata workflows is an important factor in building this structure.

Key Financial Metadata Workflows and Why They Matter

Metadata workflows are critical for managing and utilizing financial data effectively within an organization. These workflows contribute to accuracy, consistency, compliance, and efficiency in financial data management processes and give finance teams the ability to distill valuable insights from their data to make informed decisions.

Data Ingestion and Collection

Data ingestion can be time-consuming and error-prone when finance teams rely on manual processes to collect data from a variety of disparate sources across the organization.

Automating data ingestion helps break down business application silos and accelerate the availability of the accurate data needed for analytics, business intelligence, and decision-making.

Standardization

Non-standardized data creates integration and interoperability issues that can lead to inaccurate reporting and analytics.

Enforcing standardized data formats and structures ensures data is consistent across the organization, which reduces errors, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies that can impact data quality.

Validation

Manual validation is not only time-consuming, but also increases risk and degrades the trustworthiness of your data.

Implementing automated, real-time validation tools helps ensure the accuracy and integrity of financial data by identifying and resolving errors early in the workflow and enforcing governance standards.

Change Management

Many organizations still manage change requests manually, using spreadsheets, emails, and maybe a SharePoint form. This approach is highly inefficient—and risky—as finance teams manage increasingly higher volumes of data and navigate frequently changing compliance requirements.

Implementing a metadata management solution that seamlessly integrates with all of your business systems will ensure changes are shared across both upstream and downstream target applications.

Governance and Compliance

Lack of data governance introduces data inconsistencies that can have a significant negative impact across the organization—from logistics and operations to business intelligence and analytics.

Creating and enforcing data governance and compliance standards is critical for maintaining financial data integrity and ensuring data is handled and stored according to the most current regulations.

Integration with Reporting and Analytics

Data is the driving force behind the decisions that impact business growth and determine key outcomes.

Integrating reporting and analytics tools into metadata workflows gives finance teams centralized access to accurate metadata from all applicable business applications and provides single-pane-of-glass visibility into trends that may influence decision-making.

Four Ways to Streamline Metadata Management Workflows

The following best practices will enhance the efficiency of your financial metadata workflows and improve the results of your data management efforts:

Integrate Financial Systems

Implementing a centralized metadata management solution that seamlessly connects your financial systems and applications provides a comprehensive view of financial data across the organization, enables real-time information for strategic decision-making, reduces manual errors, and increases data reliability.

Empower Business Users With Self-Service Analytics

Providing business users with self-service analytics capabilities not only frees up technical resources for more strategic activities, but also ensures that decision-makers have access to up-to-date financial insights and business intelligence at all times.

Utilize Metadata Management Tools

Leveraging the right metadata management tools provides a single source of truth for your organization's data analytics and change request management. These tools help maintain data integrity and compliance, offer insights into the impact of changes across applications, and provide a more complete understanding of the data used to make financial decisions.

Establish and Enforce Data Governance Policies

Unifying your data governance and metadata management strategies creates a comprehensive framework to manage and protect financial data, maintain regulatory compliance, and establish a standardized approach to data management across the organization.

EPMware’s All-in-One Solution Streamlines Metadata Workflows and Improves Data Management

Optimized and efficient metadata workflows are an essential component in a successful data management strategy. EPMware’s unified metadata management and data governance platform centralizes, integrates, validates, and governs metadata across applications, providing a rock-solid foundation for effective data management.