MULTI-PARTY MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT (MDM)

An Essential Element to Improve Supply Chain Network Performance, Financial Health, and Resiliency

Critical Business Challenges

Across manufacturing, retail, CPG, food service, automotive, healthcare, pharmaceutical, high tech, aerospace, logistics, and government sectors, organizations managing global supply chains struggle to maintain and improve business performance. Master data challenges and even traditional Master Data Management (MDM) solutions are holding businesses back.

  • With multiple enterprise systems, including ERP, MRP, SCM, SRM, and CRM systems, many organizations have difficulty creating a common data set and sharing this data both internally and across their many suppliers and service providers.
  • Poor data quality impedes an organization’s ability to generate relevant information for operational consumption.
  • Lengthy and costly data harmonization projects make deployment of new processes and business models difficult or even impossible.

As a result, Supply Chain executives cannot make timely business decisions in near-real time and affect business outcomes with well-informed actions.

Traditional MDM solves some of these issues within four walls, but projects can be prohibitively expensive and can take a long time. Also, ongoing support costs are high and the projects by themselves do not drive good ROI.

For organizations to excel in the new global supply chain, they will need to extend MDM to the entire supply chain. One key obstacle is that propagating master data between partners scales poorly, since each partner has to:

  • Establish a physical connection with all others, thus bearing a high cost.
  • Implement transformations to handle the others’ data (unless a format is universally agreed on, which is often a difficult proposition).
  • Create a copy of each other partner’s data, where latencies and errors often lead to great inconsistency across the supply chain network.

With potentially very high upfront costs, many organizations cannot carry out a full master data initiative to facilitate supply chain operations. Yet rethinking the solution approach to MDM is crucial, especially when there is an explosion in data volumes and transactions across the supply chain, often fueled by rapid organic growth or aggressive acquisition strategies.

A strategic focus on master data management enables the highest performing supply chain execution. One Network’s MDM solution enables the fast, accurate decision-making necessary to drive business outcomes and provides a competitive advantage for the entire supply chain network.

Network-Wide MDM for Entire the Supply Chain Network

One Network Enterprises is a global provider of multi-party business network technology that enables autonomous supply chain management. A key success factor is to enable partners in the supply chain network across major industries to reconcile master data efficiently and accurately. The One Network MDM solution is a multi-party, multi-echelon, cross-functional, and process-oriented approach to manage information about customers, products, suppliers, locations, and other entities. With Multi-Party MDM, network-wide partners are connected to a shared, network solution:

  • Connect Once: Partners connect just once to the network.
  • One Instance: Partners’ master data is represented just once, not N times.
  • Strong Permissions: Partners share data using a permissions framework.
  • Partner Specific: Partners need only create their own mappings – they do not need copies of all attributes.

An organization can reference their partners’ master data, but no longer needs to maintain partners’ data – saving time, reducing costs, increasing data quality, and eliminating errors.

The One Network MDM Process

The Multi-Party MDM solution provides comprehensive enablement of MDM processes:

  • Data Modeling: Enables complex relationship modeling between application sources, between products and services, and between parties with Community Master Data Models for intra- and inter-enterprise modeling.
  • Data Gathering: Provides configurable user forms to gather unstructured data as a data request. Use role and geo-based permissibility to handle distributed ownership at site-, org- or enterprise-level.
  • Data Cleansing and Computation: Allows for configurable validation rules and customizable workflows to find and correct data errors (e.g. automatic correction of addresses).
  • Reviews and Approvals: Includes configurable approval routing rules for sending data to authorities for approval. Complete audit trail of changes and approval history.
  • Master Data Reconciliation: Multi-domain, fully reconciled master data models cover an extensive body of 400+ supply chain models, including site, item, routing guide, carrier contracts, fleet, and equipment.
  • Data Publishing: Enables subscription-based publishing of changes to Master Data to relevant parties. Users can subscribe through alerts, emails and download-friendly CSVs. Permissions ensure that clients receive only the data they are allowed to receive.
  • Monitoring and Alerts: Includes a full set of analytics and performance metrics.

According to a report from the supply chain analyst firm ChainLink Research, in defining MDM in the supply chain “flexibility of data— extensibility—is crucial, since the supply chain is a fluid environment where products, people, and situations often change. Networks need to be architected to support a shared common data model, while allowing for the dynamic creation of community-specific or company-specific customizations of and extensions to that data model.” Extensibility, flexibility, and the resulting productivity are enabled by the strong modularity of the One Network business network platform.

Leverage Multi-Party MDM to Drive Supply Chain Network Performance

By bringing visibility and reliability to enterprise data, new MDM programs that are business outcome-oriented can improve business decision-making and drive improvements in both operating and financial metrics. After many successful Multi-Party MDM deployments, we’ve observed customers in both commercial industries and government agencies leveraging data in their end-to-end supply chain network to make better strategic and operational decisions, such as:

  • Retail: “Are we able to reduce our freight costs and maintain on-time deliveries?”
  • Manufacturing: “Do we have opportunities to reduce inventories while simultaneously improving customer service levels?”
  • CPG: “What are our customers buying across various channels, geographies, and lines of business?”
  • High Tech: “Can we react to variation across our promotions and new product launches?”
  • Across Industries: “Can I allocate supply in real time across my entire network to maximize revenue?”
  • Healthcare: “Can we produce clinical cross-reference to alleviate backorder problems?”

With One Network’s Multi-Party MDM you can unify your supply network with a single version of the truth and act in unison for optimal performance and results.