Master Data Management
The role of master data management in the manufacturing industry
The slightest edge over competition in today’s volatile market can spell success for your organisation, while failing to modernise critical systems in time can see you struggling to catch up. With the adoption of digitisation, manufacturing organisations generate massive amounts of data every day. From customer data to vendor data and from financial data to product data, there’s so much information being amassed constantly. In such a scenario, it is critical to have a master data management (MDM) system in place to efficiently consolidate and store accurate and organised data in an accessible manner.
Timely access to up-to-date data across the organisation can influence strategic decision-making, increase productivity, and provide customers with precise product information for a satisfying experience. Incorporating MDM in the manufacturing processes to collate and organise inputs from multiple data streams can significantly improve business performance in today’s information age.* The features and functions of a competent MDM system that can help to elevate your business include:
- Extracting, sorting, standardising, and organising massive amounts of business data from various sources and databases within the organisation
- Eliminating corrupt, incomplete, duplicate, incorrect, and irrelevant data
- Monitoring and auditing company data
- Seeking out new customers
- Tracking the brand’s social media interactions
- Analysing market trends and predicting sales trends
- Monitoring employee performance
- Speeding up decision-making
Let’s take a closer look at how a sound manufacturing MDM plan directly impacts a wide variety of processes.
- A single source of truth: Bringing together data from various systems and compiling it within a central repository provides a single source of accurate, high-quality data to employees, customers, vendors, marketplaces, and business partners. Such a centralised system is invaluable in ensuring that employees across processes and departments formulate their strategic decisions on the same data sets. This saves time, improves collaboration, and minimises the complexity of the data supply chain.
- Transparency and traceability: A centralised view of data across the product lifecycle, from raw materials to final results, can empower business owners with detailed information to track critical processes and provide insights for creating better product experiences. Customers too can benefit from access to accurate product information, which helps them in making purchasing decisions.
- Improved business agility and efficiency: Centralising business-critical data can simplify product development and shorten the time to market, substantially affecting revenue. From the factory to the marketplace, access to accurate product information across the value chain can ensure steady product performance, cohesive teamwork across processes and business associates, and happy customers to drive up profits.
- Risk mitigation and damage control: Unforeseen challenges — such as product recalls, workforce disputes, or supply chain disruptions — can be diligently analysed with quick access to accurate, up-to-date business data, thereby minimising negative impact on the company. With the same centralised data accessible to all concerned parties, remedial measures can be updated to necessary locations in real time to resolve the issues and get operations back on track without delay. Having suppliers, customers, and employees on the same page is an invaluable asset to any organisation and helps you extract more value from these relationships.
- Streamlining core business processes: With an MDM system in place, it enables an organisation to consistently feed precise data to various processes and teams, such as inventory management, warehousing, packaging, administration, and shipping. This streamlined approach opens up opportunities to leverage new, more efficient business models, with various teams within the organisation collaborating in ways previously not possible. Improving efficiency in this manner is a sure route to healthy business growth.
- Accelerating an organisation’s digital transformation through real-time analytics: A quality MDM service will incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning to prepare the organisation’s data for an in-depth analysis. Such real-time advanced analytics help extract more value, increase profitability, and discover newer business processes to take the organisation to the next level.
How can Infosys BPM help ?
In the modern era of digital business, data is a major asset for any organisation. Systematically organising all company data will have an immediate effect on ROI and costs, ultimately boosting performance. Infosys BPM offers several master data management solutions that can profoundly affect your organisation’s manufacturing and distribution processes. Know more about our offerings for master data management in the manufacturing industry and accelerate your business’s digital transformation.
*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
