Why maintaining site detail is more important than ever in MDM and can be a revolutionary step

In the past when you are going to purchase anything from grocery store, you purchase it straightaway by giving the exact amount of money on the MRP,or bargain and give money on bargained price.

Busy shopkeeper will not ask you any question, where you reside or where you are from, what he really cares is the money which you are paying to him.

Now comes the second scenario, when shopkeeper is not that busy like the previous one, and he has some time for you. He will start interacting with you; he will start asking questions about you, your family and your address details as he sees you as future customer.

Now comes to present, when you are paying bill in departmental store electronically, be it through credit card or debit card .Guys sitting at departmental store will not ask, who you are or where you are from, but swiftly they will give you one membership card to fill your generic details, where they will have your name, your contact details and mobile number. They will store that information in their generic database.

Now comes the third scenario when you are purchasing anything from eCommerce websites, (like amazone,flipcart or ebay) but before that, you again need to fill your name and your contact details.You usually pay the price online, and later on your goods will be dispatched at your shipping address; you also have an added feature where you can pay in cash once you receive the goods at your shipping location. In this case yours billing address and shipping address will remain the same.

So nothing has changed much, other than memorizing your address to store it electronically in database.

Banks are already maintaining your address details for credit card or debit card. Departmental store maintains your contact details as future prospects, eCommerce websites are maintaining your address details  for future delivery.

So have you counted how many times your address and contact details have been maintained in different databases.

Possibly you can’t  some examples are.
1. Bank
2. Aadhar Card
3. NPR
4. Ration Card
5. Passport
6. Driving License
7. Voter id card
And it’s countless.
Our contact details are being stored almost everywhere and once you are changing address they all become out of sync because no one corrects it everywhere.

The solution to this is not an easy one…
Since currently we are maintain address on different databases made for different purpose so it becomes almost impossible to have one Site HUB which is universally acknowledged and easily uneatable with proper digital verification. Something likes unique identity of your address.

But what we can do maximum here?

At least we can maintain a cleansed address which is almost near accurate ….think about the scenario when you have around million customers and for each customer you need to send some gift items on X’mas eve.

If out of million even ten thousand customer have any typo error in street information or zip codes or non standard abbreviations, the delivery of gifts item can be declined else transit time will increase if typo will be small and recognizable.

For each returned gift item there is additional cost which your company needs to bear and on top,please think about the customer service which will be hugely impacted in rather negatively way.

Solution to this is Address Cleansing.

MDM already have few vendors who provides address cleansing software which works in comparing mode (with your address details) to their respective database and discover any discrepancies in zip code, spelling the street information or state abbreviations. Sometimes they suggest you alternative or sometimes they correct the address automatically.
Using address cleanser can save you good bucks and above all will provide good customer service which worth millions.
Address cleansing have more pros than cons
Pros

·         Reduces postage code for the undelivered Item because of incorrect address
·         When sending billing invoice to correct location you will get timely payment
·         Routing of mail post to correct address will make life cycle of delivery faster.
·         Customer service experience will become smoother.

Cons
·         No Cons.

Customer and customer address are two separate entities and both needs to be cleansed. Both entity shouldn't  be seen  in isolation but they complement each other for the betterment of your customer service.

MDM and data science can tackle Data Credibility

While deploying the MDM solution every enterprise chooses its own business rule by which they cleanse the consolidated data coming from different applications.

Since these rule varies across all the different organization so even though final data is cleansed but there is a question mark on credibility of the data.

At least without any international standard defined data quality rule I will not take those data as reliable and before presenting the facts based on the data I will always double check.

Un reliable data can have many negative consequences (The clinical data, space exploration results, in correct financial projection)

These data which is your master data but not credible can bring your company down in moments leave aside the regular maintenance work which you are doing to correct it.

Management team which makes decision based on this data looses faith quickly if data is not authentic and un reliable

The solutions

I have seen many people advocating that data credibility is not  IT issue its rather business process issue and can be reduced if not fully by proper communication between data user and data creator.

My argument will be, see by this method we can reduce the error but not eradicate it fully, in the world of MDM and BIG DATA let IT people should jump to solve this issue before making it process oriented.

Logic to my argument

1. Data Quality rules are not unique so make the rules as generalized and standard one.
2. Organization should be certified if for data quality they are using those rules
3. The volume or quantity of  data is so huge that credibility cannot be tackled by business process
4. Business processes can only tackle the data at the time of creation but they cant track in between when they changes drastically.  

Incredible data lead you to losses your revenue, your customer faiths, so start defining your process,controls the incredible data usages and makes your business decesions based on true facts and not only on your master data

Understanding PIM (Product Information Management system)

Product information management system is product based enterprise-data-management solution which enables its user to centralize all product information from heterogeneous systems to create a single view of product information

Many people who come from manufacturing domain think PIM and supply chain are interrelated, in some sense they are true but rarely do they know how they are related.

Their understanding can be depicted by the following diagram

Manufacturing->PIM->SCM

But the real flow is given below.It’s neither unidirectional nor bidirectional its infact circle which doesn’t have end point.

Manufacturing->PIM->SCM->PIM-> Manufacturing

Oracle, SAP and IBM all three are major player in PIM area

Who are the targeted customers?

1. Any one can say manufacturing industries should be targeted customers
2. Country like China, Japan, and South Korea which excels in electronic and automotive industries are its targeted customers.
3. Other developed and developing countries where manufacturing industries are blossoming are also its targeted customer.
4. Ecommerce Industries can be its biggest customer if we don’t bind PIM to geographical locations.

Its future

Product information management system has good future ahead as ecommerce industries are widening and other than Supply chain system they are also maintaining big warehouses full of inventories of different kind.

Vendors should not always look to look east policy and concentrate on (CHINA ,JAPAN or South Korea) but they should start focusing on emerging countries like India and Brazil too, which is going to be the major manufacturing hub. Automotive and electronic industries have seen sudden growth in these two countries.

In My Next Blog I will focus more on Domain aspect of PIM

UNDERSTANDING MASTER DATA MANGEMENT

Master Data Management as part of information management is a complex task and includes all strategic, organizational, methodological and technological activities in relation to the master data of a company. Its mission is to ensure the consistent, complete, current, accurate and high-quality master data to support performance processes of a company.

Master data management maintains the single view of core business entities ex: - Customers, Sites, Suppliers, employee, products which till now scattered across different application systems.
MDM handles many data types but till recently it was concentrating on customer data, mainly because it directly helps business folks for taking decision in sales and marketing process and can help in increasing sales.
Many people think MDM as technology but ifacts it’s a business application
Deploying MDM is not an option for big organization but in fact it’s a necessity, many organizations has started accepting its relevance and proactively they are going to different vendors and have started asking questions for MDM.
MDM focuses more in four departments (ETLM)

• Data consolidation (E)

Consolidating data from multiple source system and integrates into a single cleansed data store. Process wise this activity depends on business rules which varies across organization and their needs.

• Data staging (T)

Defining staging relational model where you can store the cleansed data coming from multiple business system. This step keeps only relevant master data only.

• Data propagation (L)

Sending data from staging table to data model schema tables in different ERP (Which Organization has chosen be it oracle or SAP

• Maintaining data(M)

Once data is copied to ERP MDM it’s a data librarian responsibility to maintain the data
The one thing is common among initial three stages ie Data Integration...
Data consolidation->DI->Data Staging->DI->Data Propagation
Every ERP product are now a days is web service enabled and XML being the standard for data transfer so most data integration are based on XML messages flow.
Several vendors are offering solutions for MDM and DI, including packaged ERP application vendors like SAP and oracle, infrastructure vendors like IBM and independent solution vendors like riversand and Kalido.

Left alone in the world of BIG DATA,SMAC and MDM

Many senior IT folks now a days wants to join MDM, SMAC or BIG Data to enhance their career, and to gain the knowledge they start absorbing the basic of these new technologies by participating in meetings aligned across these technologies.
Some people even go to attend the different university training also (like Oracle University, SAP, Informatica etc).
But is it enough for them? Some people will say yes, as they are senior enough and can understand the basics of these new technologies.
I would say BIG NO...People who are coming from different technological domain needs time to prepare for these technologies and to attain the basic I would say it would require at least a Month.
Advise to them to scale up quickly

1. Internet is flooded with Blogs on MDM, BIG DATA and SMAC. go and read those blogs...Blogs are meant for you people only.
2. Don’t rely on your principal architect as question can be asked from you as well ,the winning chance to get the projects becomes more if you impresses the client rather than your principal architect.
3. While discussing the matter with in your team please listens more and speaks less. Senior Management having a tendency to speak more but better if you listen to your experts and ask questions.
4. Once you get any projects please asses if you really have required skill set.project can be won by showing number strength, but now customers are more demanding and instead of numbers they can ask how many experts you have in these technologies so before starting a project you should have at least few technology and few domain expert sitting beside to you.
5. Please also perform the profit feasibility study in case you are hiring resources from outside if you have enough number of projects in pipeline going forward to make them deployable always.
6. Start training junior and Mid Junior resources in these new technologies and these are the peoples, you will require most in project execution.

Now you are ready to work in these technologies,go and face the customers.