5 Features of An Effective Master Data Management Tool

by Innovit Corporate Affairs | July 25, 2018 | Blog

Master Data Management helps optimize business performance, keep client data secure, maximize sales and increase brand awareness. Most offer specific features for certain industries, business sizes, and budgets. Here’s what we think are key things to think about to find the best MDM tool for your business.

 

5 Key features of Effective Master Data Management Tools

1. Matching and Linking

Matching and linking features play a critical role in most businesses, especially when it comes to managing a large list of corporate contacts.

Most organizations have a number of funnels in which they maintain contacts and upload new contacts. The issue that businesses can run into is having duplicates of corporate contacts or potential clients. They then run the risk of making many phone calls to the same client, causing frustration and a lack of professionalism.

Having the matching and linking feature eliminates issues like this by getting rid of any duplicate data or contact lists, maintaining the integrity and accuracy of the data and source systems and can automate these tasks instead of wasting resources to manually clean the data up.

 

2. Applying Specific Business Rules

A huge feature that should be present in your master data management tool is the ability to set specific rules for your business. This will not only provide an ease of use that some tools may not have but will also allow you to customize the tool for your business.

Some rules that businesses would like to set include features like how you use your data strategy so you may reduce risk, set rules that enforce the integrity of the data, put in place rules that adhere to company policies, and much more.

You can also create a set of rules that enforce an approval process when uploading data to your MDM tool to both mitigate risk as well as prevent useless data uploads.

 

3. Manage Location-Based Data

An important feature that would prove to be beneficial to certain businesses includes maintaining customer data within geo-boundaries.

By law, there are certain pieces of data that cannot transcend certain regions or countries. This helps increase certain border-specific security measures such as the General Data Protection Regulation, or the GDPR. This allows personal data to stay safe against countries outside of the EU.

 

4. Maintaining Data Security

Keeping your data security is critical.  So it’s equally critical that your master data management tool includes the ability to create security-based policies and rules (who has access to what, for example).

You can protect your client and team member’s security by using encrypted data attributes. This can include creating user passwords to keep key private information safe and away from unverified eyes. This will help protect sensitive data, such as private company and client information, and reduce the risk of a security breach.

 

5. Implementing Data Enrichment

Data enrichment will add value to – and improve – the quality of your organization’s data. It makes it a more valuable asset – enabling you to get more out of it and do more with it.

  • Have a strategy to manage your product and catalog data efficiently (data collection and manual maintenance can take a long time delaying your product launch).
  • Ensure high degree of data quality (customers move to other brands when there is missing, inconsistent or inaccurate data).
  • Streamline your digital asset management (customers expect to see images and videos along with the product details).
  • Have a strategy to be agile and meet the data requirements of retailers (each retailer has its own template, data requirements and formats) – manually maintaining each retailers’ requirements is costly and error-prone.

Next Steps

Innovit’s globally certified master data management solutions are ready to streamline your business’ data. Contact us today to learn how we can help you manage multiple domains of master data including product, customer, vendor, asset, location and pricing in a single centralized application.

Back