Master Data Management (MDM)

The Challenge

Your organization is struggling with inconsistent and duplicate business-critical data—such as customers, products, partners, and suppliers—stored in different formats in disparate systems across the enterprise. A few things that can result from this situation include the following:

  • Acquiring and retaining customers becomes more costly and time-consuming.
  • Time-to-market and operational efficiency become less of a competitive differentiator.
  • Acquisition data becomes more costly and time-consuming to capitalize on.
  • Well-informed decision-making suffers across the enterprise.

The Alternatives

The primary alternative is building a custom or open source MDM solution in-house. The questions are:

  • “How much time and money am I spending managing and synchronizing data manually across my organization?”
  • “Can I accurately identify my customers and partners in my systems, and can I accurately respond to their trends with the best offerings?”

With touch-points throughout the enterprise, MDM is a business critical function. You need the ability to systematically apply MDM rules within different domains, match rules to data quickly, and govern MDM on an ongoing basis.

Our Solution

Southport MDM. Leveraging the Informatica suite, this capability allows your organization to implement MDM including the following capabilities:

  • Model – address the unique dimensions of your business problem.
    • Model all common master data domains without imposing fixed or predefined business definitions.
    • Maintain all master data lineage and history for audit and compliance purposes.
    • Mitigate project and business risks automatically—all changes to the master data model automatically update the business rules.
  • Recognize – accurate, scalable matching and pre-built MDM matching rules quickly identify critical business master data throughout the enterprise.
    • Rapidly identify duplicate master data in any number of different formats and data sources, by leveraging the highest scalability benchmarks in the industry, and sub-second response times.
    • Perform faster, more accurate searches on your master data in multiple languages and character sets, easily accommodating the complexity of your global B2B or B2C business.
  • Resolve – instills trust in critical business master data and keeps history intact.
    • Increase the confidence in business-critical master data by creating the “best version of the truth” at the cell level and sharing it across the enterprise.
    • Improve auditing capabilities and compliance by tracking master data lineage and history using timelines showing when the master data or hierarchies were created and modified to improve auditing capabilities and compliance.
  • Relate – hierarchy management provides visibility into the relationships between critical business master data.
    • Gain new insights into your business through an understanding of the relationships between business-critical master data.
    • Group contacts into households.
    • Organize companies and channel partners into corporate hierarchies.
    • Classify products and employees into taxonomies that can be easily manipulated.
  • Govern – workflow management enables business and IT collaboration in data governance thru the MDM platform.
    • Support enterprise-wide master data governance policies and processes with robust workflow and approval capabilities.
    • Improve operations with business-user access to consolidated and reliable master data.
    • Reduce costs and increase productivity by managing master data changes and exceptions and automatically creating tasks to resolve non-automated master data matches.

Who Benefits?

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you may benefit from Southport MDM capabilities:

  • Do you have trouble rationalizing data from your disparate systems?
  • Do your systems use different codes for the same countries?
  • Are you having trouble accurately identifying your customers?
  • Do you have no way of persistently linking your customers to all of the accounts they hold with you?
  • Do your IT and business users continually struggle with who owns data for certain entities and how they appear in your business and IT systems?

To learn more about this offering, please contact us.