Features to Look For in a Master Data Management Solution

Data quality impacts every corner of an enterprise, whether it’s finance, IT, marketing, or sales. Implementing a master data management (MDM) strategy will help ensure every business decision in every department is based on reliable, accurate, and up-to-date analytics and intelligence.

However, MDM solutions are not all the same, which is why it’s important to do your due diligence when comparing different technologies. Evaluating each option based on useability, scalability, ease of integration, security, and pricing model will help you identify the solution that best meets the needs of your organization.

To help streamline your search for an MDM solution, focus on finding a platform with the right feature set to ensure you get the highest level of performance, scalability, and usability from your investment.

9 Features to Look For in a Master Data Management Solution

There’s power in having a single view of your master data. Centralizing, standardizing, and validating master data from disparate sources makes it easier to track deployments, integrate changes, and act on insights and analytics. 

Selecting an MDM solution that includes these nine capabilities will empower both technical and non-technical users to create, maintain, and secure a single source of reliable truth across all of your business applications and systems. 

Matching and linking

Enterprise business data is captured from a variety of sources and that data is often siloed in the system or application where it was collected. When multiple systems and applications collect the same data and store it in different formats, it’s difficult to isolate the “right” version to use for analytics and intelligence.

Matching and linking algorithms can collate duplicate records and create a single, standardized record that can be shared enterprise-wide for decision-making, performance measurement, and business operations.

Governance

Data governance is an essential factor in successful master data management. After all, if you aren’t enforcing business rules that govern how data is used and by whom, there is no real way to ensure the accuracy and trustworthiness of that data.

Selecting an MDM platform that includes governance capabilities will enable even non-technical users to create, apply, and manage governance policies across the enterprise.

These business rules should be shareable across different use cases—for instance, from hierarchies to chart of accounts structures—so you can change a rule once and apply it everywhere without soliciting help from your IT team.

Privacy and security

Data use and privacy regulations—and penalties for noncompliance—get stricter every year. To protect your organization and its data, your MDM strategy needs to support robust privacy and security policies and practices.

For example, establishing role-based security policies allows administrators to define who can access the master data, deploy requests, and approve changes and enhancements.

Working with a solutions provider who takes security as seriously as you do is an excellent way to improve your security profile. EPMware is SOC 2 Type II certified, so you know our data security practices have been evaluated by an independent auditor and meet the highest standards.

Enrichment

Enrichment makes your data more actionable by supplementing existing information with data from other sources to fill in the blanks, add context, or create a more comprehensive view of the data. 

Data enrichment requires validating and cleansing your existing data to ensure data sets are accurate and up to date. Then it can be integrated with additional internal and external data to broaden insight, expand analytics, and reduce risks. 

Code-free integration

Traditional master data integrations can require weeks of planning, configuration, and implementation. This approach is also at high risk of delays due to human error. One erroneous keystroke can introduce bad data that isn’t detected until a transaction fails.

Code-free integration reduces risk, increases efficiency, improves data quality, and eliminates reliance on IT resources to build integrations and configuration and deploy changes.

With seamless integration with Oracle EPM, OneStream, EBS, SAP, and many other business systems, solutions like EPMware empower business users with no programming knowledge to take control of the creation, management, and analysis of master data, freeing up IT resources to work on other high-value tasks.

Audit and reporting

As mentioned above, data privacy is a hot-button issue today. And with data being used to drive almost every business outcome, compliance needs to be built into your MDM strategy. Look for a solution with automated audit and reporting capabilities to ensure you have full visibility into who is changing data and why.

For example, EPMware creates a comprehensive, audit-friendly data trail every time a request is deployed that clearly identifies:

• When the change was deployed.

• Whether the change was made successfully.

• If the deploy failed, why it failed.

• What was changed (includes the previous value for comparison).

• Who approved the change.

Dashboards

Dashboards add visibility, flexibility, and ease of use to your MDM processes. Depending on the solution, you may have access to dashboards that allow you to drill down granularly into workflows to see at what stage a request is sitting, where it is in the approval process, and what impedances there are. 

EPMware allows users to track requests through development, UAT, and PROD environments, so you always know the status of a request and what actions may be needed to deploy successfully.

Automation

Today’s enterprises consume, process, analyze, and store huge volumes of data, making it impossible to manage master data manually. Automating enterprise master data management increases the value of your master data by:

• Increasing intelligence that helps uncover hidden insights and connections within your data.

• Reducing risk.

• Improving compliance with regulations and standards.

• Enforcing data governance policies.

• Deepening trust in your data analytics.

Unlimited node count licensing

Many of the leading MDM solutions offer per node or per month pricing plus the cost of optional add-on functionality. At the enterprise level, this pricing model can quickly add up to a huge investment.

By comparison, EPMware offers enterprise licensing with unlimited nodes per managed technology. This approach is extremely cost effective for enterprises because it allows the entire technology to be managed in a hub-based model regardless of the number of nodes.

One Master Data Management Solution to Do It All

The right MDM solution can help your organization reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and increase the value of your data. 

EPMware’s unified master data management and data governance platform incorporates all of the features and functionality you need to improve master data quality, reduce strain on your technical resources, and lower your costs for solution setup, training, deployment, and maintenance.

See EPMware at work in the real world. This Medtronic Case Study explains how EPMware helped Medtronic’s finance group overcome complexity by centralizing master data management, implementing data governance, and improving audit capabilities by simplifying their documentation and performance tracking processes.