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?
Tommy is an analyst at ACME Company and is responsible for maintaining information on Suppliers that ACME does business with that are in the Western United States sales territory.
What is the Business Problem?
The sales team informs Tommy of increased discrepancies and even conflicting information about ACME suppliers in their sales reports. This is caused by the ERP platform’s lack of data standardization and governance capabilities, which leads to duplicate by allowing users to inadvertently create new record for suppliers that already exists.
When reports are run for various purposes (ex. chargebacks, compliance reasons, etc.) these data discrepancies are especially accentuated as there is no way to determine which data points on duplicate supplier records are up to date and trustworthy.
Current Process
As Tommy pulls reports for the sales teams on ACME’s suppliers, they notice there are multiple variations of the same customer and even incomplete data are present within the reports. This is the result of the lack of governance within the ERP 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 merge 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 supplier data to be more accurate and trustworthy for reporting and downstream analytics.