Last updated on March 8th, 2024 at 11:53 am
The year 2022 is bringing to businesses a great number of challenges and opportunities never seen before. Manage your data with Synopps to take advantage of new chances emerging and minimize threats. In this post, we try to reflect on the current trends and what may be coming down the road. We reveal the top five reasons why data is important to your business and why master data management (MDM) should be your focus.
Money
We have been seeing a very high level of inflation across the globe. The historically high prices are hitting the wealth of consumers and affecting B2B and B2C segments. Rebuilding logistics chains, looking out for new — cheaper — suppliers, and attempts to make production less money and time-consuming are the main topics for C-level managers and down the management vertical.
MDM is a superb answer to the price challenge as it doesn’t require big investments, but at the same time gives an easily scalable and multiplied positive effect for business. A right master data strategy in place reduces time spent on data handling, optimizes purchases and decreases other costs across a company as well as enhances overall profitability. It also lowers risks of non-compliance because of outdated or irrelevant data submitted to government watchdogs or supervisory bodies, a failure that could lead to a fine slapped on an organization.
Compliance
We have started this theme above and will continue here as it has not only a financial dimension but also a reputation one. The most important subject regarding reputation is ESG which stands for environmental, social, and governance. The acronym relates to a set of policies that a company adheres to in order to make its business beneficial for society by complying with national and international legislation, convention, and accords and even beyond them.
ESG reporting software and practices are widely promoted by companies as they are willing to demonstrate their social responsibility and recruit more support among government bodies, clients, and partners. The promotion is being done by various means, including the publication of separate special reports or putting an ESG chapter in quarterly and yearly general corporate reports. These documents consist of figures, for example, charity investments, and reduction of CO2 emissions. Any controversy among the figures or inconsistency with reality is a fast and reliable path to a scandal. Disorder in master data in its turn is a fast and reliable path to such a mistake.
Data Driven Decisions
Software is evolving, and over the last decade, it has made terrific progress. More and more sophisticated programs are rolled out onto markets arming businesses with abilities in production and marketing that were available before. A cluster of big data technologies enables analysts to see trends and correlations with the help of data accumulated and analyzed by software that can see what a human being’s brain cannot normally see. A modern chess computer program calculates a million combinations of moves a second to offer the best strategy, which even the best world chess champion ever will not be able to do. That’s exactly what modern marketing tools do.
Any computer program consumes data, so poor-quality data would yield the same results as rotten tomatoes would provide for gazpacho. And while you will be trying to extract insights from a sea of wrong data to get ill-informed decisions, your competitors with the right master data will go far ahead, driven by the power of big data magic.
Automatization
That’s the same field we talked about earlier, the digitalization of business, just another side. While big data analyses master data to give more knowledge and understanding, the automation coming predominantly in the form of robots makes it possible to do routine operations without human engagement or with a minimum amount of it.
The general story here about master data management is the same again as the one above bad data can yield a positive result only by chance. Usually, it leads to wrongly made assumptions and decisions. Without clean, complete and valid master data that can be obtained through cleansing of master data, their enrichment and correction no software would be able to cope with business tasks. You cannot automate poorly organized business processes — the first and maybe the most important slogan of automatization says.
Distant Work
The COVID-19 pandemic sent many workers home. Only part of them has returned back to their offices after restrictions had been dropped. There is no direct connection between the new job culture and master data management, but an indirect one does exist. Look, remote jobs mean a challenge for IT departments as more reliable Internet connections and work of corporate IT systems are needed. In these conditions, a risk of a mistake increases let alone system outage periods. More complicated conditions dictate increased demands to the reliability of data. No master data management procedures in a company, no well-designed data architecture mean that mistakes that inevitably occur in a remote job mode will make things even more and more complicated.
Synopps is ready to help your company with installing MDM procedures that are necessary for 2022 and will be more necessary in 2023.
