Why Master Data Management is Important

In today’s data-intensive enterprises, data redundancy and inconsistency isn’t just a symptom of poor data management; it’s a prescription for untrustworthy analytics and useless business intelligence.

Implementing the right master data management solution eliminates many of the data-quality issues that can interfere with strategic initiatives by delivering standardized metadata across systems, applications, and business processes.

Master data management (MDM) serves four key purposes within the data ecosystem: 

• Centralize master data

• Provide visibility into data maintenance processes

• Make master data available to systems and applications

• Support data governance

It’s crucial for everyone who relies on business data for reporting and analytics to dig deep and really understand how master data management fulfills those core functions by synchronizing and governing enterprise data across every system and application.

Here Are 7 Reasons That Master Data Management Is Important.

Many people either don’t understand or underestimate the value and security that MDM provides. So, let’s break down the top seven ways that MDM streamlines processes and reduces risk.

1. Eliminates Duplicated Effort

Most master data isn’t department-centric, which means multiple departments can collect and maintain the same master data, but in different ways. These master data silos lead to inaccuracies and inconsistencies across systems and applications. Centralized MDM ensures that every application in every department uses the same accurate and up-to-date master data for transactions, analytics, and operations. 

2. Enables Data Governance Processes

Without both a data governance program and an MDM strategy in place, organizations have little control over their data, including who can change it, who is using it, and for what purpose it is used. This lack of control creates serious security vulnerabilities and introduces errors and inconsistencies, which can impact the data’s business value. 

Aligning data governance and MDM enables organizations to automate and streamline business processes, monitor metadata requests, and validate data points across systems and applications.

3. Provides a Single Source of Truth

MDM creates a single source of truth by ensuring that accurate, relevant master data is available for reporting and cross-functional processes across all systems and subscribing business applications. This single source of truth guarantees your data is audit-ready, and that your business stays in compliance with regulatory rules and requirements. Built-in validations also help maintain the integrity of your master data by aligning data points across disparate systems, which prevents failed transactions and other reconciliation issues.

4. Empowers Business Users

Once considered strictly an IT responsibility, MDM now relies on both IT and business-side efforts to ensure that essential business processes have access to accurate and consistent data. Out-of-the-box adapters and real-time validation scripts empower business users to implement and configure MDM for supported applications and systems, with minimal IT involvement.

5. Accelerates Deployment

The right MDM platform can significantly shorten deployment time. As mentioned above, built-in adapters and validation scripts eliminate the need to open a ticket with IT every time that a change request is submitted. Code-free integration allows business users with no coding knowledge to own the change management process and maintain data integrity across business applications. 

6. Increases Efficiency

Slow data processing and data duplication are two huge sources of enterprise MDM inefficiency. Managing today’s high volume of data generation and consumption isn’t sustainable without the automated processing capabilities an MDM platform provides. Additionally, your MDM solution will eliminate duplicate, inconsistent, and redundant master data records, which streamlines and speeds up your data processing efforts. 

7. Drives Decision Making

An accurate, holistic view of the organization’s master data is critical for leadership and stakeholders to make fully informed, fact-based business decisions. MDM provides centralized access to consistent, accurate, and timely master data that can be applied confidently to business processes, analytics, and intelligence to drive strategic decisions that support business outcomes.

Master Data Management is the Cornerstone of Data Quality.

If you stop to consider how much data your organization processes and how many systems and applications that data touches every day, it’s easy to visualize the repercussions that even one bad data set can have throughout the business.

Implementing a comprehensive MDM strategy that also includes data governance is one of the most effective ways to keep your master data accurate, consistent, and aligned across your entire application landscape.

Download this Paysafe EPMware Success Story to learn how EPMware helped a leading specialized payments platform company realign its master data to eliminate data reporting inconsistencies and process inefficiencies that were causing integration failures across multiple business applications.