You might dismiss the idea of master data management on account of the fact that you feel that your business is too small for MDM.
This is one of the reasons why we think that the solution from Pretectum should be thought of differently.
Yes, it’s true that there are some big MDM system offerings out there, that are complex and require deep commitment to deploy and run; after-all MDM can be a crucial tool if businesses truly want to monetize data and achieve extraordinary success. But that all comes with an awfully big investment in terms of money, time, and people resources.
After an initial evaluation, you may find that your business processes and supporting systems need a major overhaul or rethink, in response to what you discover. We don’t think there is any business that is too small for CMDM, what we do think, is that you need to understand what the value is, that CMDM will bring to your business on a per record or per-event basis. Starting small and extrapolating the benefit is the best way to determine what you should do.
By starting with customer data, we think you are starting small but with an area of potentially the greatest impact for your business, in terms of identifying quick win opportunities bottled up in the customer master data space before you consider branching out further.
Pretectum sees the customer master as a pivotal dataset that is used by marketing, sales, service, support, accounting, and a host of other areas of the business. Accordingly, we’re solving for data quality, duplicates and data integration, and sharing of the customer master as the key piece of the puzzle for reducing some of the friction that exists within business areas that view the customer through a different lens from one another.
We see MDM as a way for you to harness the power of the customer record and align all the business areas and processes around a single, unified view of who and what a customer is. If business areas feel that their view of the customer is a little different, then they have the opportunity to make use of a subset of the customer concept attributes and just take care of that.
Those business areas that have a broader remit with respect to understanding and working with the customer and the customer master have their own choices including retaining and maintaining data that is unique to their function and not visible to any other area of the business. Most importantly it is all secured in a single repository accessed by user-id and credentials and complex permissions model.
MDM is a long-term investment and the customer master is the most obvious place to start for the greatest impact. Implementing MDM is easiest when you start with clearly delineated goals and measures of impact and performance against those goals.
Pretectum is there to help you along the way.