Master and reference data
One customer, one supplier, one product. In every system.
Master data management decides who your customers, suppliers and products are, and keeps every system agreeing on it. It's where our team has spent most of its career, building the platforms and running the programs.
01 / Symptoms
What it looks like.
- The same customer under three IDs and two spellings.
- Credit terms that depend on which system you ask.
- Duplicate suppliers and duplicate payments.
- Product codes that multiply after every acquisition.
- Country, currency and unit lists that differ by system.
02 / What we do
The full scope, not just matching.
- Deciding which systems are sources, and what each entity is and isn't.
- Match, merge and survivorship rules the business agrees with.
- Hierarchies: parent companies, ship-to and bill-to, product families.
- Onboarding and change workflows, including KYC and KYS, so records are right when they're created.
- Ongoing enrichment and validation, and stewardship queues with owners.
- Reference data: the shared code lists every system should use.
- Feeding mastered records downstream to ERP, CRM, the warehouse and AI.
On leading MDM platforms, including Informatica, or custom-built on Databricks, Snowflake or your warehouse when a platform isn't the right answer.
03 / How it connects
Why the other areas lean on it.
Quality rules need to know which record is the customer. Governance needs an owner for it. Reports and AI need the same answer every time. That's why most of the data governance solutions we've built were organized around master data.
04 / Experience
- Informatica
- Team members who served inside Informatica as product management executives, architects and engineers.
- Lineage
- Siperian MDM Hub through 9.x and 10.x to IDMC.
- Scale
- A global customer and supplier master at a large industrial company, integrated with SAP, Salesforce and about 20 ERPs.
- Domains
- Customer, supplier, product, location, counterparty, securities, member, provider and asset.
Where it shows up
Questions
Do we need an MDM platform?
Not always. Some companies need matching rules, a governed list and a process change. We diagnose before recommending software.
Isn't this just deduplication?
Deduplication is one step. The work that lasts is deciding the sources, the definitions and the workflows that keep records right.
Start with 30 minutes.
Tell us the symptom. We'll tell you plainly whether we can fix it.