Master Data: The Key Ingredient in a Digital Planning Transformation

The surgical white neon lights of a Michelin-starred restaurant kitchen come on. The stainless steel countertops reflect the kitchen brigade coming in, like a perfectly polished mirror. One by one, each team member takes place behind their station—knives polished, crisp white aprons neatly pressed. Service is about to begin.

The kitchen staff is ready. The air is dense with anticipation. The menu has been laid out weeks in advance. Each intricate dish calls for precise ingredients, measured to perfection and combined at the right time.

The head chef makes their way towards the pantry, opens its doors, and, in perfect anticlimactic fashion, finds a chaotic mess. Some ingredients are mislabeled, others are missing, and a few have already expired. Panic arises in the kitchen. What will be of tonight’s service? A menu that’s either delayed, off-balance, or worse—completely inedible?

Prepping Resilient Supply Chains

While one might hope to leave the drama to cook-off competitions and celebrity chefs, companies trying to run their supply chains with fragmented, inconsistent, or inaccurate data often face similar scenarios.?

The ingredients (data) exist, but they’re scattered across different storage areas (ERP, other data systems), labeled inconsistently (SKU variations), or missing key details (demand drivers). A chef can’t produce a Michelin-worthy menu without reliable ingredients, and businesses can’t plan or respond to disruptions without high-quality data.

A key challenge is lack of visibility across the supply chain. Companies struggle to see a full, accurate picture of their capacities, constraints, inventory, and alternative options—like a chef trying to execute a degustation menu without knowing what’s available in their kitchen. To truly adapt to market changes, companies must integrate demand signals and advanced analytics.

Stuck Cooking in the Dark?

A critical question arises: Why are organizations struggling to prepare for surprises?

The answer almost always boils down to one thing: a lack of clean, structured, and accessible data. In Gartner’s Future of Supply Chain report, executives repeatedly cite data reliability as the biggest obstacle to transformation.

Large organizations echo the same frustrations:

??? “We do not have the data to take the next step in our digitalization journey.”

??? “We would love to implement driver-based forecasting, but we do not have right quality data or enough of it.”

??? “We have been working on supply chain visibility for years, but the master data lives across different systems and is often not accurate.”

It’s as if the kitchen brigade had to scavenge for ingredients that are scattered across multiple locations: some stored in the freezer, some mislabeled in the pantry, and others scribbled down in an old, handwritten cookbook no one can get anything out of. Even when companies attempt data cleansing, it’s often a one-time effort rather than a continuous process. Without a structured approach, the mess creeps back in over time.

Clean Up the Kitchen

Instead of systematically struggling with scattered ingredients, companies need a structured approach to organizing their data—one that ensures every piece of information is accessible, accurate, and continuously updated.

Organizations need a platform that offers a comprehensive representation of the enterprise and possesses the technical capabilities to support these efforts. The o9 platform, with its Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG), acts as the ultimate kitchen organizer, ensuring businesses always have the right data when they need it. Here are seven ways to organize data for better decision-making.

1?? Standardizing Ingredient Names Across Systems

• Problem: The same product appears in different databases with different names (e.g., Sku12, SKU12, SKU-12).
• Solution: o9’s EKG automatically recognizes and unifies these inconsistencies, just like a master chef standardizing ingredient names across multiple recipe books.

2?? Establishing a System for Placeholder Ingredients

• Problem: Planning often requires placeholder data for products not yet fully realized.
• Solution: o9 enables companies to maintain accurate placeholders that evolve into final product data—similar to how a chef preps mise en place before finalizing a dish.

3?? Creating a Flavor Profile Map for Demand Relationships

• Problem: Planners struggle to predict how one product affects another (cannibalization, halo effects).
• Solution: o9’s analytics automatically infer these relationships, just like a chef knowing which flavors complement or overpower each other.

4?? Facilitating Collaboration Over Ingredient Sourcing

• Problem: Data comes from multiple supply chain partners, each with different standards.
• Solution: o9 enables real-time collaboration to align on key data points, just like a restaurant ensuring suppliers meet their ingredient quality standards.

5?? Using Smart Analytics to Detect Recipe Changes

• Problem: Supplier lead times often don’t match real-world performance.
• Solution: o9 continuously updates lead-time assumptions based on transactional data, like a chef adjusting cooking times based on how an oven actually performs.

6?? Integrating Real-Time Data for a Fresh Pantry

• Problem: Master data becomes outdated because real-world conditions change.
• Solution: o9 ingests IoT and real-time updates, ensuring decision-makers always work with the freshest data—like a chef sourcing farm-to-table ingredients daily.

7?? Capturing Tribal Knowledge for Consistency

• Problem: Key supply chain knowledge is stuck in spreadsheets or people’s heads.
• Solution: o9 helps encode this information into a structured, scalable system, like a top restaurant documenting secret family recipes for future generations.

Master data management goes beyond housekeeping tasks. Without a structured, continuously improving approach, businesses will always struggle to make confident decisions.

The o9 EKG acts as the Michelin-star kitchen organizer that ensures companies always have the right ingredients, properly labeled, stored in the right place, and ready for use.

After all, great meals are built on great ingredients.

Yes, chef.