WHAT IS MDM?

In an increasingly competitive global market, more and more companies are looking for ways to gain a competitive edge and are now including data quality as part of their assessment of IT and business systems. With increased pressure for regulatory compliance, it has become even more imperative for organizations to understand, manage and govern key data processes that run their operational systems and fuel decision making.

WHY MDM?

MDM is not an event, but a journey that covers all organizational processes and application systems. It challenges and standardizes the way a company creates, manages, maintains and synchronizes master data across the enterprise. It is a journey towards creating a “single version of the truth" which has become a “must-do” in today’s competitive and regulatory environment.

MDM is not just about a tool, or a platform or people. It’s about a new way to manage data across the enterprise which includes an assessment of the health of the current data as well as the processes that create and manage that data. Without a closer look at these, an organization could fall into the trap of implementing MDM with “garbage” data and faulty business processes that end up causing recurring data quality problems.

BENEFITS OF IMPLEMENTING MDM

	One consistent definition of various master data types across the enterprise (harmonization)
	Create and maintain rich content using standard templates (compliance)
	Ability to consistently distribute information internally and externally between ERP or legacy IT systems
	Improved reporting, more reliable business intelligence and effective decision making
	Consolidate, search and synchronize master data effectively

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CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

PEOPLE
In addition to the usual steps like obtaining management support and identifying a sponsor, it is critical to ensure involvement of the business users in an MDM implementation. They are the only ones with an in-depth understanding of the business rules, hierarchies, linkages or data templates (taxonomies and data dictionaries) required to create, maintain or enrich the data. Another critical factor is to have an effective change management plan because MDM is not an event, but a journey that impacts the way users handle data.

PROCESS
At Utopia, we firmly believe that assessing and optimizing business processes underlying data creation is key to a long term master data management strategy. If a process is broken, it will create bad data repeatedly. In order to mitigate such a recurring problem, we review and optimize all underlying business processes to ensure “dirty” data does not re-enter the system.

TECHNOLOGY
Ongoing governance is just as critical to the success of an MDM initiative. Without active governance, data quality will likely degrade again over time. Governance can be implemented in a combination of approaches:

  Deployment of standard taxonomy(s) and data dictionary(s) to ensure compliance to a
   standard across the enterprise. Utopia’s taxonomy experts have experience in multiple
   data types across multiple industries.
  Establish real time checks so that bad data is filtered out before it enters the system.
   Utopia loads all the relevant rules on to a rules engine that can be accessed in real time
   to screen a new record for inconsistencies prior to accepting it in the database.
  Periodic audits to ensure a healthy baseline is maintained over time. Utopia conducts such
   audits using a combination of our proprietary tools and content specialists.

GETTING STARTED

Utopia follows a five-step process to implement SAP MDM. It is a proven methodology that takes an MDM implementation from concept to go-live in a timely and cost effective manner.

ENTERPRISE DATA ROAD MAP
It is extremely important to know the types and volume of enterprise data that will be included in an MDM implementation. Our specialists identify, map and establish linkages for all master data among the various systems across the enterprise.

BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE
Once we have a feel for the “Data Blueprint”, we establish the business case for MDM. We profile existing data for consistency, completeness, duplication and conformity to establish an ROI from an MDM initiative.

DATA PREPARATION & MDM CONFIGURATION
Unless the data is transformed prior to loading into MDM, chances are it could be a case of “garbage in, garbage out”. Our content specialists standardize, consolidate and enrich data to conform to standardized templates. We study the data linkages and underlying business processes to configure SAP MDM for optimum performance.

DATA MIGRATION, CONSOLIDATION & INTEGRATION
Once the data has been prepared and MDM configured, we consolidate and load data from multiple sources into MDM.

TRAINING & GO-LIVE
Training is a key component for ongoing maintenance and governance of any data quality initiative. Our consultants conduct on-site training to encourage adoption and usage from business users thereby ensuring a much higher ROI.

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