Benefits of Data Governance for Enterprise Master Data

We live in a world where everything revolves around data and has become imperative for organizations to treat data as an enterprise asset. Master data poses many challenges such as how to effectively manage it, keep it up to date, sustain it and ultimately leverage it to make trusted organizational decisions. From customer and employee information, to product lists, supplier profiles, and article or asset records, organizations depend on master data to carry out crucial tasks across many lines of business. The accuracy of this data, therefore, is paramount to a company’s efficiency, compliance, and bottom line. However, gaining a 360-degree view of master data is easier said than done.

Most enterprise master data solutions offered in the market today adopt a collaborative approach for data matching and consolidation from various systems to create a golden record for master data which is then fed to the downstream systems - a one-way channel. This conventional approach can be successful in organizations where changes are minimal to their existing systems and business processes.

But because most organizations today are constantly changing due to various initiatives such as upgrading their existing IT systems to achieve scale, consolidation of the IT landscape to a single global instance, integrating new system(s) after a merger, etc. the data management approach and long-term strategy cannot be one-way transactual. In these scenarios where the matching process gets really complex, data stakeholders from multiple lines of business would need to determine what the single-source of truth should be, and how it can be maintained enterprise-wide, regardless of the system it originates in. 

SAP® Master Data Governance and the extensions for EAM and Retail, along with SAP Asset Information Workbench by Utopia, focus on the alignment of people, processes, and technology to create a unified, streamlined bi-directional path for creation and governance of master data, across multiple systems of record.

For enterprise-wide master data to be created, managed and sustained, requires a CASCADE Effect across the organization: 

• Connecting internal, external and network sources of information and master data
• Accelerating acquisition, transformation, and processing of complex data records
• Standardizing reference models in a central repository - assets, work, parts
• Collaborating with data stakeholders to align on master data governance tools, practices and policies
• Advancing your business rules framework to improve organization and serve as a catalyst for information handover and shared data knowledge
• Distributing quality master data across the entire landscape and back to source systems
• Evolving into an organization that makes business-decisions based on trusted, accurate master data

Your data is one of your most valuable assets - imagine what can be accomplished when the conversation shifts from the data itself, to how it can transform your organization.