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Modern business owners leverage data for multiple operations, from introducing new products to acquisitions. For this reason, businesses end up gathering large volumes of data which becomes difficult to manage traditionally. The large data size isn’t the only problem businesses face. Businesses collect data from disparate sources, and ensuring uniformity across data silos is easier said than done. That’s where master data management (MDM) comes in handy.
Master data management has become a one-stop solution to inefficient data management results. A company’s master data or reference data can be valuable to its data management efforts, presenting endless use case benefits. This article gives three reasons to use master data management tools.
1. Productivity and Efficiency
Gartner Inc’s Magic Quadrant Report for 2021 revealed an increase in the number of businesses adopting master data management tools. More importantly, the report further explains how companies like Informatica used data management to become industry leaders for the sixth time last year.
Businesses like Informatica often use traditional data management approaches to collect master data from multiple departments, leading to data duplicates. Dealing with data duplicates can increase the time and stress to sort out and draw out the best version. Master data management tools allow businesses to generate and process data effectively. The approach reduces the workload time and improves data quality from all stakeholders involved in the master data management process. Master data platform systems can also help eliminate IT overhead costs, providing a consistent and reliable MDM database to improve visibility across multiple organizations.
Beyond the cost-effective and workflow perks for businesses of all sizes, businesses also use MDM tools to personalize customer relationships and interactions, identify new opportunities, understand the company’s unique needs and personalize their offerings. As a business, you can also leverage MDM tools using them as a new way to reduce your workload and increase your time-to-market for your new products and services.
2. Improves Decision Making
Businesses today depend on data-driven decisions to thrive; many struggled to survive through the numerous challenges brought on by the pandemic. Experts advise businesses to leverage data for better business decisions ensuring business processes remain agile in the face of uncertainties. But imagine a scenario where your data professionals have to wait a long time before accessing data to improve business processes and decision-making; as a general rule, the faster it takes a business to access valuable data analytics and actionable insights, the better its chances to field better decisions. And business owners can count on master data as the powerhouse that drives dynamic data to make fact-based decision-making possible.
Master data management provides a single view of a business entity’s data. That way, data professionals don’t have to look at their social media data differently from what their websites and mobile apps present. This uniformity improves data access and can facilitate the rate at which business owners make real-time and data-based conclusions.
3. Enhances Data Quality
Managing data through traditional resources might lead to several redundancies. This often happens when dealing with structured, unstructured, and semi-structured from multiple sources. Each body responsible for a data source may have its standards for cleansing and ensuring data quality. In contrast, a master data management tool can be a single source of truth and a central unit for efficient data compliance and governance efforts.
Data professionals can cleanse, model, purge and analyze data from this single source without adhering to different standards.
Master data platforms also allow your business to control data management responsibilities, and you can decide who gets to change and maintain your master data as a business. This data management approach is a better shot at ensuring data quality, unlike leaving things to chance where different people can tweak their data at different stages of the data management process.
For these reasons and more, master data management can be a great choice for businesses of all sizes across different industries.
