You’ve surely heard about how big data can give your business a competitive advantage. It can take a look at troves of information to give you deep insights about your customers, workflow, and even new business opportunities. However, all that isn’t an automatic result of implementing big data solutions – it’s the outcome of a strategic approach to data, whose solid foundations depend on proper data management.
This is where Master Data Management comes in. Through it, you can better prepare the data at your disposal to increase its consistency and accuracy. This will all result in stronger and more relevant data sets from which you’ll pull actionable directions for your business.
This isn’t a minor thing. A proper MDM strategy can take your business on a more efficient and productive level while passing on an MDM strategy (or having an underdeveloped one) can lead to poor decision making or worse, impair your ability to comply with industry standards. That’s why we think it’s essential to take a more in-depth look at MDM, why it’s important for you, and why you should always consider hiring a nearshore company to help you with it.
What is Master Data Management
Master Data Management (MDM) is a tried-and-true strategy to handle the multiple data you collect across all channels in your business. It combines two parts: processes specific to your company and the tech tools to manage all data. Both of those parts play a huge role in the proper collection and curation of the data – you can’t have a proper data management system without one or the other.
First, you need to have strong practices to collect information from multiple sources, including marketing channels, customer accounts, payment methods, sales leads, service providers, market reports, and customer satisfaction surveys.
Having different data sources can provide you with a better overall understanding of your business. Still, it comes with a caveat – it can also muddy your data sets to render them useless. That’s because the collection process only cares about gathering information, regardless of it being incomplete or erroneous.
To correct that, we use IT solutions that can help curate the vast amounts of information you collect every day. With the help of digital tools, you can define rules of consistency to increase the accuracy of your data sets, keeping relevant information, and discarding the rest.
Why MDM Matters
Having relevant data sets from which to pull insights is the most compelling reason that justifies the adoption of master data management tools. Using them can elevate your data-driven strategies and provide you with suggestions to improve your entire chain and associated workflows.
Understanding your customers, identifying unattended market niches, improving your supply chain, boosting your distribution, and complying with standards and regulations are things that you’ll only achieve with proper data management – something you won’t be able to get without MDM. The practices and tools associated with MDM help you unify your available data, taking it from raw, unintelligible data troves into clean and organized data sets.
That isn’t the only benefit of using MDM, though. There are other reasons why you should be considering master data management strategies, including:
- Process Standardization. Most businesses have a lot of redundancy in their processes. Through MDM, you can help unify them and streamline your workflow on a company-wide level. This will let you lead a leaner operation that improves transparency and efficiency while reducing losses and boosting visibility.
- Better Spend Visibility. Speaking of visibility, MDM can provide you further monitoring capabilities to analyze your expenditures. This paves the way for improved efficiency in your cost management, reducing costs of redundant processes, and improving your procurement efforts.
- Supplier Insights. Since you’ll be using MDM tools to collect information from all sources, it can also lead to a better understanding of your supplier network. Thus, you can take a deeper look at your business partners to detect subpar performances, risks, and threats, which can all be used to improve your agreements with different vendors.
Having better data at your disposal impacts your capacity to make better decisions across your entire organization. It can help you with cost optimization, quicker product launches, and implement more efficient processes. The best part of it all is that the MDM strategy forms a strong environment you can manage from a single place whose output can provide you with the foundation for your business’s data-driven strategy.
Why Nearshoring Your Master Data Management Strategy
Implementing a sound MDM strategy is more challenging than it looks. It’s a meticulous job that requires skill and experience at a two-fold level.
On the one hand, you need to be capable of defining collection processes that cover your entire operation and feed the tools with data from all the sources that matter for your decision making. On the other hand, you also need the best possible MDM tools you can get since they’ll be responsible for cleaning massive amounts of information daily.
While you might be able to define the collection processes for your data efforts, the MDM tools part can get tricky pretty quickly. There are plenty of off-the-shelf platforms that promise you to bring the power of MDM to your business. Yet, their implementation can be a challenge in and itself – and that’s without considering the possibility that a canned software might not be well-suited for your business needs.
That’s why hiring a nearshore development company might be in your best interest. With a seasoned partner, you can better understand your data-related opportunities and make the most of them with tools tailor-made for your specific processes. An external partner can fill in the talent gaps when it comes to data management, helping you with more than just developing your MDM solution.
Thus, a nearshore development company can help you with informed suggestions on strengthening your MDM system and practices better, training your workforce, and helping you maintain, support, and update the tools to keep them providing peak performance.
Finally, having a nearshore partner is the best way to leverage off-site help. The nearshore model provides you with the benefits of outsourcing (mainly reducing costs and accessing necessary talent and resources instantly) while having some advantages of its own. For example, the possibility to work with a team located in a nearby country with no language and cultural barriers and a similar time zone.
Don’t Neglect Master Data Management
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this one – you can’t afford to ignore the importance of an MDM strategy. Doing so will lead your business to have an underdeveloped MDM strategy or not have one at all. That will keep you trailing behind your competitors and expose you to potential problems with compliance.
Thus, it’s better to fully embrace MDM as an asset for your organization and do so in a way where your MDM-related efforts are continuous. That’s because master data management isn’t a one-and-done type of thing: you need to keep adjusting your strategy and perfecting your tools. That’s the only way you’ll enjoy the solid foundations of the data-driven approach only MDM can provide.
