How can Master Data Management help my organization?
- Resolve data inconsistencies and create a single source of truth for customer and vendor records for B2B and B2C businesses.
- Centralize customer profiles to identify engaged clients, at-risk accounts, and retention opportunities.
- Optimize cross-sell and expansion strategies by consolidating revenue across entities.
- Improve cost savings through contract renegotiation and supplier consolidation through cross-portfolio aggregated vendor spend data.
- Connect fragmented purchase data across guest checkouts and multiple emails to uncover true customer lifetime value and enable smarter personalization (B2C).
What is a Master Record?
A master record, or “golden record”, is a single, authoritative source of truth for key data in an organization. It’s a comprehensive and foundational data entry that contains essential, non-transactional information about key entities. This record is created by consolidating information from multiple data sources (like CRM, ERP, marketing systems, and external databases) to produce one unified, accurate version of critical data. The master record represents the most complete, consistent, and reliable version of the information, serving as the reference point for other systems and stakeholders across the organization. The master record is central to Master Data Management (MDM) because it addresses one of the primary challenges that MDM seeks to solve: data inconsistency across systems.
How the Master Record Relates to Master Data Management (MDM)
In the context of MDM, the golden record is the primary goal. MDM is the strategy and set of processes that guide the creation, maintenance, and management of master data, which includes key data entities like customers, products, suppliers, and locations.
Here’s how the master record fits into an MDM strategy:
- Data Consolidation: Integrate data from multiple sources to identify and merge duplicate or inconsistent records, creating a single golden record.
- Data Quality and Accuracy: MDM ensures that the golden record is always up-to-date, consistent, and accurate. This involves ongoing validation, cleansing, and deduplication to maintain the integrity of master data.
- Data Governance: MDM establishes policies, roles, and standards to maintain data quality, security, and compliance, ensuring all changes to the golden record are controlled, monitored, and align with organizational standards.
- Data Synchronization and Accessibility: With the golden record as the central source, MDM synchronizes this data back to source systems, ensuring consistency across all platforms and providing a single point of access for stakeholders.
Practical Example
Without a master record, your organization runs the risk of treating these business entities and customers as two distinct entities/individuals versus one in the same, leading to data inconsistency and errors, inaccurate financial reporting, redundant marketing outreach, inefficient customer service and difficulty scaling operations.
Master data record management uses matching and consolidation rules to identify that both records belong to the same business or person. By setting up matching criteria such as URL for businesses or name and address for individuals, and using data deduplication algorithms, MDM consolidates both entries into a single golden record for “Company ABC” and “Jane Smith” with both records and other relevant details linked to a unified profile.