Is mastering data within your organization a nightmare?
From our experience, at least the large organizations, are always having the challenge of coordinating a diversity of ERP, CRM, data warehouse, legacy, consolidation and analytical systems. Ideally one would like to have them linked by shared structures and items 100% aligned. In practice this seems to be the greatest challenge. Do you recognize yourself in any of the following?
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Were there mergers or acquisitions in the past?
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Do you have multiple sources and reporting solutions using own items and reporting structures?
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Is reconciling figures a time consuming activity of each reporting cycle?
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Do you recognize uncertainty on accuracy; data is missing, incomplete, duplicated or inconsistent?
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Have you ever planned to do a re-implementation or refinement of the chart of accounts, for instance to accomplish operational excellence?
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Is your organization changing rapidly and your solutions don’t seem to keep up?
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Would you like to see the consequences before making the organizational changes?
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Is it challenging to sync alternative reporting views simultaneously across applications?
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Would it be the ultimate goal to have all solutions aligned?
Consider the following approach to enable you to solve these issues.
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Think about the most important dimensions that describe meaningfully your organization;
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Clean up all (legacy) structures that do not comply with the unified ones;
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Design a set of powerful views that are key to manage and steer your organization;
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Integrate these dimensions and views into a single structure;
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Share them across the entire organization and versatile solutions.
Master Data Management will help you to have:
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One place to make changes, one structure, one vision;
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Sharing the changes simultaneously across individual systems;
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Communicating and publishing the change across the organization (via web);
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Comparing views and structures;
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Keeping alternative structures in sync with the primary structures;
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Versioning, “what-if” and “as-of”;
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Use of change management: business changes and business defines the change, not an IT administrator;
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Audit trail;
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Software (vendor) independent and compatible with any tool;
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Not an IT but a business discipline.
