Master Data Management, Part 2 – Not Just a Regulation Tick-Box
1st February 2018
In part one of this series, We explored the regulation benefits of deploying a Master Data Management (MDM) solution. In part two, we will examine the benefits of MDM on an organisation’s data processes and analytical capabilities.
Just as MDM can get an organisation’s data processes up to the new standards of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it can also create more efficient processes and deliver new levels of insights to improve customer engagement and understand buying behaviour.
A well-designed MDM solution should not replace existing systems it should simply connect to them. The data from an organisation’s CRM, ERP, Retail POS, E-Commerce platform, WMS and any other system should be extracted, processed and consumed to deliver real enterprise insights, customer engagement and buying behaviour.
Here are six main benefits to using an MDM solution to improve data processes.
1. Get to Know Your Customers
Information from an MDM solution can be used to inform marketing campaigns, send personalised customer promotions and appraise overall business strategies. With a full MDM solution, you will be able to understand, engage and ultimately increase customer engagement and loyalty by accessing historical data and predicting purchasing patterns.
By gathering these insights, you will be able to provide a unique customer experience across each touch point to maximise spend and increase sales.
2. Improve Your Product and Sales Channel Performance
Once an organisation understands their customers, these insights can be turned into actionable sales efforts. An MDM solution gives Sales teams the ability to monitor cross-channel buying patterns and create segmentations to maximise sales revenues, which in turn will inform range planning and identify best-selling lines.
By monitoring cross-channel buying patterns, executives will be able to benchmark sales channels and location performance, and reconcile stock movement information with this data for optimised stock levels so an organisation is better informed to predict future trends accurately.
3. Analyse Your Pricing and Marketing Strategy
By evaluating sales performance, and sharing that information across departments, organisations have the power to deliver real-time updates. Marketing teams can use this data to create targeted marketing campaigns based on highly segmented data.
These campaigns can then be evaluated and analysed in relation to pricing change impacts on sales. This creates a feedback loop of creation, analysis, and improvement that will allow any organisation to generate stronger marketing strategies.
4. Optimise Your Inventory
Optimising the inventory, allows executives to measure productivity by location, role and hierarchy to inform decision-making and focus resources on commercial value-adding activities. Monitoring stock levels in real-time ensures sale stock is kept minimal.
5. Plan Internal Resources
A true MDM solution will allow organisations to identify and measure resource productivity and the efforts of employees. This will allow an optimised allocation of resources and appraisal of employee performance.
6. Overall Benchmarking
By connecting to, and reconciling, all data sources within a business, an MDM solution should provide an organisation with trust and confidence in data-based decision-making. Reporting and KPI visibility should be streamlined and consolidated to one platform, rather than trying to piece together information from across several systems manually.
Fundamentally, an MDM solution should be able to drive profitability by promoting a cross-channel and department functionality, that allows for a greater level of coordination and analysis of an organisation’s sales and marketing efforts.
Final Thoughts
MDM solutions provide powerful analytics and enterprise insights to businesses, while ensuring compliance with the latest regulations. The benefit of this is that it doesn’t replace existing systems and therefore shouldn’t have a great impact on the day-to-day management of a business. Becoming a data-focussed business that makes informed decisions with highly accurate and useful information shouldn’t be difficult. For more information about Data Clarity’s MDM solution, please call +44 (0)3333 1111 00.
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Part 2 of our series on Master Data Management, discussing the benefits of MDM for your analytics and data processes. MDM, GDPR, Master Data Management, Business Intelligence
