A recurrent theme on this blog is the way organizations should handle party master data management as examined in the post What is Best Practice: Customer- and Vendor- or Unified Party Master Data Management?
What I advise my clients to do, is to have a common party (or business partner) structure for identification, names, addresses and contact data. This should be supported by data quality capabilities strongly build on external reference data (third party data). Besides this common structure, there should be specific structures for customer, vendor/supplier and other party roles.
This week I attended the MDM event arranged by Marcus Evans in Barcelona. The presentation by Udo Couto Klütz of the industrial giant Robert Bosch highlighted the clever way of handling customer master data, by having a partner master data concept.
At Bosch they have reached the conclusion, that unified partner master data management is the way to achieve:
- A single source of truth
- Transparency
- Standardized processes
- Worldwide applicability
- One compliance standard
- Increased efficiency
I absolutely agree.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 