The global master data management (MDM) market is estimated to grow from USD 1.6 billion in 2019 to USD 3.4 billion by 2024, with the multi domain MDM solution segment expected to grow at the highest CAGR during this forecast period.
Traditional MDM systems are purpose-built for a single type of data or domain. Each of these data domains is composed of different types of master data such as customer data, product data, supplier locations, and charts of accounts used across the enterprise.
With this approach, organizations are required to tackle each domain one at a time with a third-party application integration that specializes in the relevant data type. This automatically results in a higher TCO and complexity for the organization without a single integrated platform that can manage multiple domains and share metadata, reference data, business rules, and other critical information to meet expanding business needs.
A multi-domain Master Data Management solution equips enterprises with the ability to integrate and analyze disparate data assets residing within different business units or departments. It further provides the capability to achieve a consistent, semantic view of some or all of the organizations’ master data domains depending on the enterprise’s needs. This offers significant advantages that accrue from strategic, enterprise-wide data governance, management of consistent master data across organizational units, alignment of business data definitions, and the effective execution of data stewardship.
Let’s take a further look at how a multi-domain MDM solution can benefit an organization –
Meet Diverse Business Needs
Business-critical data resides in more than one domain, making it essential to manage master data across domains to further turn them into strategic differentiators and meet diverse business needs. For instance, identifying customer buying patterns requires the ability to master both customer and product data, or streamlining the supply chain requires access to accurate product information and supplier records. By mastering multiple data domains and their inter-relationships, organizations can reduce cycle time, control costs, enhance marketing initiatives, and improve on forecasting, planning, and transactional outcomes, which can directly translate into measurable revenue and margin benefits.
Data and Analytics Strategies
A multi-domain MDM solution can help support modern data and analytics strategies such as adaptive governance and data fabrics. Since the master data has a single repository, businesses will have less autonomy in creating definitions and rules for data, simplifying the overall governance architecture and resulting in greater transparency. Further, a multi-domain MDM solution can also help optimize data fabric pipelines through the governed data architecture of all key data assets, including master, reference, and metadata. Moreover, manual processes such as data discovery and matching, data model design, and query optimization are automated to help further businesses expand their data fabric resource pool.
Reduced TCO
Since a multi-domain MDM solution enables organizations to break down silos, expand trusted data through the enterprise – across units, departments – providing a 360º view of products, entities, and make stakeholders accessible via a single repository, businesses can automatically avoid the time, expense, and headache of purchasing multiple data mastering products to cover separate initiatives that cross data domains and organizational boundaries. This further adds the benefit of realizing an immediate return on investment on data management projects by expediting the implementation process of solutions owing to its agile nature of mastering multiple data domains.
At this point, there are advantages for utilizing both single and multi-domain MDM solutions. But, the primary difference is that a growing number of multi domain MDMs covers most of the functionality of a single domain MDM solution, and much more. As businesses grow, it will be to their advantage to repudiate the traditional silo-based approach and fully integrate their MDM enterprise-wide. With the relevance of data and analytics and governance operating as modern-day drivers, the trend towards multi-domain MDM implementation will only increase.
A Quick Guide to Mastering Multiple Domains and Must-Haves in Your Multi Domain MDM Implementation
Regardless of whether a business is actively managing domains, it is crucial to understand multiple master data domains and the inter-relationships to successfully master the same. Enterprises derive substantial benefits from knowing more about their customers, contacts, products, licenses, vendors or suppliers, as well as the relationship between these entities. Further, to master the who, when, what, and where data types are residing across data domains, the right multi-domain MDM solution can help establish and manage the interdependencies between these domains. Here are some of the must-haves an organization needs to look into before implementing a multi-domain MDM solution –
- The solution must have automated data profiling that can examine data quality levels ranging from incoming records that need to be standardized according to business rules to tools that verify outgoing information for accuracy
- The solution must include APIs to enable scalability, seamless latching between existing and new systems, as well as real-time batch integration
- A module specific to governance must be included in order to better focus on the usage of data stewards, as well as unite individual components to provide an integrated view
- Multi-domain MDMs need to preserve raw data initially recorded in the hub and further provide a trail for auditing purposes as they are changed
- It is also crucial to enable data migration and updates without data duplication for minimum errors and inaccuracies
To conclude, the right multi-domain MDM solution will always provide businesses with the data they require to manage relationships with customers, external suppliers, and/or partners while understanding the complexity of the services that the business otherwise provides.
