Material Master Data Management - The Need Of The Hour For Today's Enterprise
The backbone of every enterprise is a robust supply chain. The very future of an organisation depends on an efficient supply chain, without which, there can be large production failures leading to major revenue losses.
Many organisations still rely on multiple backend systems to support their supply chain. They have evolved over decades by incorporating the best of ERP systems, procurement softwares, application management systems resulting in multiple platforms with large amounts of data splashed across the organisation.Although the same data is being used across different systems, the simple fact that it is spread so heavily, raises questions as to which data is the "right" data. Data management becomes difficult due to inconsistency and poor visibility leading to an incomplete inventory, causing overpurchasing and disruption in manufacturing processes, invariably increasing transactional costs. Ineffective business decisions taken due to disparate data can also lead to loss of competitive advantage over other organisations.
The best way to overcome these issues caused by data isolation is material master data management. Material master ensures data standardisation and is a centralised repository which reduces data redundancy and can be used by various other applications in the enterprise like purchasing, inventory management, invoicing etc. The main advantage of having a centralised source is that the data is clean and reliable and helps to maintain an accurate material inventory. It provides a single view of the material data to the entire organisation which will ensure the supply chain operations are more efficient leading to higher revenue and lower cost.
Although this is an ideal solution for better material master data management, there are challenges them in enterprises which have both legacy systems and new softwares. If it's a large organisation an be spread across multiple units in multiple locations. Before deciding on an MDM tool, the first thing to be fone is to have a proper definition of what the master data is and also adopt some standards to ensure data quality.
There are many tools providing MDM solutions, available in the market and organisations can opt for which best suits its requirements. Proper data management is vital for organisations, not only to stay ahead in the game,but more importantly, to help employees save time by having the right information available, as and when required
