Maintaining Harmony when consolidating Master Data (aka Harmonization)

When the Farkel Family Flounder Frying and Flash Freezing Factory, Inc., merged with Benny Baldini’s Beer Battered Baccala Baking Business, they unanimously chose to name the new combined enterprise as F&B Foods Inc., a great relief for many of its staff writing return addresses and their suppliers sending Christmas cards. But things were not as smooth in the business divisions.? An issue with centralized purchasing developed almost immediately.

For you see many companies have evolved from organizations of multiple semi-autonomous business units.? In years past due to technology and communication constraints these entities were limited to localized resource planning applications.? In most cases master data in domains such as product, customer, supplier, employee and the like were developed independently with unrelated key identifiers. ? As a result the overall enterprise is unable to associate records from the various business units that are identical.? For example, Farkel’s identified the Homer Simpson Supply Corporation as “SIMPSUPPLY”, while Benny Baldini’s uses homer_simpl as its key identifier.? This condition makes grouping purchases of toilet paper and related products from Homer Simpson Supply to gain leverage in negotiations difficult at best.? In the case of the Product domain duplication of product master records can result in large unneeded expense, inventory overhead, false reorder triggers, lost discount opportunities and schedule delays. For more insight into the Item master confusion and the problems that can pour out, please refer our earlier article at https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/price-bad-data-vs-rise-good-chain-sys/?trackingId=18N21CGCy6ccA64KqE25dQ%3D%3D

Data Standardization:?

The first thought that Tess Techart the CIO of the new consolidated enterprise, F&B Foods Inc., had was standardization.? “Why we’ll just pick one set of key identifiers and make that our standard” said Tess.

All those in favor of Standardization

So Tess called a meeting of the IT leads from all of the divisions of F&B Foods Inc., Phineas Phoenix of Farkel’s Flounder, Mike Masterman of their subsidiary Maine Mussels and Mollusks, as well as Bob Baker of Benny Balldini’s Beer Battered Baccala and Caleb Cullin of their subsidiary Carmela’s Calamari.? All the IT directors agreed that standardization would resolve the issue, and that they were in favor, provided that their key identifiers were chosen as the enterprise standard.?

After some exhaustive discussion (aka fighting), it was decided that a compromise approach needed to be developed.? Fortunately Mr. Six Pack, the Farkel’s Chain-Sys account executive was visiting.? Six suggested that F&B consider Data Harmonization as an approach to the data consolidation and standardization issue.? He explained that in this technique all unique records are still linked via a common and standard key identifier.? A cross reference table, similar to that used for customer and supplier part number cross referencing is developed to cross reference original key identifiers from the diverse data repositories to the standard key identifier.? This technique provides a means of obtaining the standard key identifier when the original key identifier (“alias”) is presented.

Six Pack also explained more about dataZen, the MDM/DQM/Governance product offering from Chain-Sys, and how it can resolve several other issues, especially that of duplicates in master records. You can also learn what the F&B folks learned at https://lnkd.in/dS5TKuf7

Author: This article was written originally in 2011 by late Mr. Raymond Ray, director of the MDM products and solutions at Chain-Sys. Earlier to Chain-Sys, Ray Ray, as he was fondly called by his colleagues, worked for IBM.