Organizations often rely on operational reports and business analytics to make strategic decisions. Whether it is to report on supplier performance, determining distributor rebates, or better understanding of consumer purchasing behavior, having reliable master data is foundational in supporting these operational activities.
Who is Impacted?
Benny, a representative from the sales team, is responsible for retailers and distributors that have contracts to resell ACME’s products. Part of Benny’s responsibilities is to ensure the sales team has access to the most accurate and up-to-date sales and financial reports for ACME’s retailers and distributors.
What is the Business Problem?
The CRM platform which supports the Western United States sales territory has very limited data standardization and governance capabilities which leads to incomplete and erroneous data being introduced. As data from CRM is synchronized with ACME’s reporting platform, this negatively impacts quarterly financial reports from each sales territory and leads to poor decisions and actions being made by the business.
Current Process
As Benny pulls reports on ACME’s customers, they notice there are multiple variations of the same customer and even incomplete data are present within the reports. These discrepancies are especially highlighted when attempting to determine who ACME’s highest performing distributors are, forecasting demand for particular retailers / regions, etc. This is the result of the lack of governance within the CRM system, which impacts the quality of data within the reporting application.
Future Process
By introducing an MDM solution, ACME can leverage MDM capabilities to identify and connect duplicate customer records, execute standardizations and business logic to validate incoming data, and monitor data completeness. As cleansed data is then synchronized to the reporting platform this enables ACME’s B2B customer data to be more accurate and trustworthy for reporting and downstream analytics.