Liliendahl on Data Quality

The two most prominent domains in master data management and related data quality improvement are:

• Party master data and
• Product master data

Party Master Data

Most of the talk about party master data is about customer master data (including prospect master data). This discipline is often called Customer Data Integration (CDI).  Customer data is the sell-side of party master data. The organizations with the biggest pains in this area are mostly organizations with many customers (and prospects). The largest volumes of customer data is related to business-to-consumer (B2C) activities, but certainly we also see many grown customer databases in the business-to-business (B2B) realm.

The buy-side of party master data is supplier data. Fewer organizations have grown supplier databases, but surely big firms with many different departments and subsidiaries have supplier master data issues like the ones we see on the sell-side.

Also many organizations have a surprisingly large intersection of the same parties being both on the sell-side and on the buy-side. I have touched that subject in the post: 360° Business Partner View.

Product Master Data

Product Information Management (PIM) also has a sell-side and a buy-side. Also here the pains grow with the numbers. Opposite to party master data high sell-side numbers is more seldom than high buy-side numbers with product master data.

We often see high sell-side number of products at retailers where the same product also is buy-side at the same time, but where we maybe haven’t the same requirements for entity resolution at the same time. Most organizations don’t have that big issues (like problems with uniqueness) with own produced products.

Else high number of buy-side products is not so much related to buying raw materials as it is to buying things as spare parts and all kind of small equipment and assets of different kind (with software licenses being most close to herding cats I guess).

Multi-Domain Master Data Management

With multi-domain master data management there is of course a connection between sell-side party master data and sell-side product master data with opportunities in analyzing to whom we sell what and discovering cross selling openings and so on.

On the buy-side there are great potentials in looking into from where we buy similar things, looking into discount possibilities and so on.

Same same but different

A while ago I wrote a blog post about similarities and differences between party master data quality and product master data quality called Same Same But Different.

Besides having the differences between party master data and product master data I also find we have differences between sell-side and buy-side making it four different but somewhat similar and connected disciplines in master data management and data quality improvement.