Master Data Management – Moving on to a Next Level

Now that we do Master Data Management, in what should we think next?

Right yesterday I was having a conversation with my manager about our Master Data team, which is proud to manage Materials, Customers, Financial and Suppliers Master Data for 12 countries in a very large organization. We were reflecting how far we progressed on this last year, the improvements on how we work, the increased quality of our data and more importantly, the speed we gained to timely deliver data to our organization. One and a half year ago, our days were full of escalations and complains. Process improvements, roles & responsibilities and agreements in place, we can now think more strategically. We earned confidence and relevance.

As 2019 comes to its end – yes, it’s October, then, Merry Christmas! – we naturally started talking of 2020 goals. We know what we are doing and how good we are doing it. What should we do different in the next year to keep evolving and not to come back to times when we were seen as the “data entry area”? A reflection then popped up: knowing that, indeed, we are doing Master Data, how do we Master our Data?

Here’s a bit of our reflections – with my personal flavor on the ‘whys’

Number one: we need to add more technology.

Unless we reduce the level of manual intervention (or validation), our people will still have to spend time on the repetitive work. By adding tools not only we achieve faster results, but also, we reduce possibility for human error. RPA, AI, ML are becoming more and more common on business conversations and we need to add them to our routines – by the way, if you haven’t still oheard about them, above abbreviations stand for Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Let’s put less efforts on the non-value-added work and focus on the strategical part of our data.

Number two: we must increase our knowledge about Business Processes.

Data are created every single minute, at every single place. What data out there has connections with the portion of data we manage every day? What are the problems we are able to solve – or, even better, prevent – if we know the consequences of bad data entry? What solutions can we propose to our stakeholders if they know the beauty of working along with us? So, we need to go even further than we did this year and see “our data in action”.

Number three: bring our Business Partners to “our world”.

This is a consequence of number two above. Since data is created everywhere and given the dynamics of daily routine, people are biased to create their internal, or parallel, controls: “I have a spreadsheet with the correct data, so, when a problematic data comes to an invoice, I enter on that invoice and manually fix it.” Say that again?! Yes. People still rework every day instead of coming to us and fixing master data at root. Every single person touching data must have a clear understanding that we all do master data management, together.

Number four: data quality.

Every process results in a final product. In our case, master data. And every product must have quality embedded. When talking about ‘tangible’ products (a nail, a computer, a soap, a pen) it’s easy to think of their quality (how many inches, processor performance, amount of each ingredient, consistent color). Since data is intangible one must think of: areas who use the data, business rules, accuracy, availability, financial and compliance aspects. It means: if a process requires this data to run flawlessly, does the data fit to business needs, attending to all the aspects inherit to and surrounding them? So, data quality is not about how we understand it (field is filled, for instance). It must be defined from our stakeholders’ perspective, instead.

Combining the four components. Quality drives flawlessly processes, but we need technology in order to be more strategic and agile, and we have to have both Master Data team wearing our stakeholders’ shoes and they conscious about the importance of joining our journey. Only then, we’ll be able to master our data.

With this, all of us can achieve our main goal to operate at our best every day.