Multi-Domain MDM

What is Multidomain MDM?

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

Multi-domain Master Data Management is usually perceived as the union of Customer MDM, Supplier MDM and Product MDM. It is. And it is much more than that.

Customer MDM is typically about federating the accounts receivable in the ERP system(s) and the direct and prospective accounts in the CRM system(s). Golden records are formed through deduplication of multiple representations of the same real-world entity.

Supplier (or vendor) MDM is typically about federating the accounts payable in the ERP system(s) and the existing and prospective accounts in the SRM system(s). A main focus is on the golden records and the company family tree they are in.

Product MDM has a buy-side and a sell-side.

On the buy-side MDM is taking care of trading data for products to resell, in manufacturing environments also the trading data for raw materials and in some cases also for parts to be used in Maintenance, Repair and Operation (MRO). The additional long tail of product specifications may in resell scenarios be onboarded in an embedded/supplementary Product Information Management (PIM) solution.

On the sell-side the trading data are handled for resell products and in manufacturing environments the finished products. The additional long tail of product specifications may be handled in an embedded/supplementary Product Information Management (PIM) solution.

What is multidomain MDM

Multidomain MDM does this in a single solution / suite of solutions. And much more as for example:

  • Supplier contacts can be handled in a generic party master data structure.
  • Customer contacts can be handled in a generic party master data structure
  • Besides the direct accounts in CRM the indirect accounts and contacts can in the party master data structure too. Examples of such parties are:
    • Influencers in the form of heath care professionals in life science.
    • Influencers in the form of architects and other construction professionals in building material manufacturing.
    • End consumers in many supply chain B2B2C scenarios.
  • Employee records can be handled in a generic party master data structure. The roles of sales representatives and their relation to customers, influencers, product hierarchies and location hierarchies can be handled as well as purchase responsibles and their relation to suppliers, influencers, product hierarchies and location hierarchies can be handled.
  • The relation between suppliers and product hierarchies and location hierarchies cand be handled.
  • The relation between customers and end consumers and the product hierarchies and location hierarchies can be handled.
  • Inbound product information feeds from suppliers can be organized and optimized through Product Data Syndication (PDS) solutions.
  • The relation between customer preferences and product information can be handled in Product eXperience Management (PXM).
  • Outbound product information feeds to resellers can be organized and optimized through Product Data Syndication (PDS) solutions.

Welcome EnterWorks as a Featured Solution on The Disruptive MDM / PIM / DQM List – and to Europe

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One of the rising stars on the Master Data Management (MDM) and Product Information Management (PIM) scene is EnterWorks.

Enterworks Europe LaunchThe EnterWorks solution has during the latest years, as a small crowd of other solutions on the market, grown from being a PIM solution to be a Multi-domain MDM solution. But they have not stopped there. EnterWorks is also a Multi-enterprise MDM solution and is thus covering the needs of sharing master data and product information within business ecosystems. This is, as stated by Gartner, a particularly interesting value proposition in the context of digital ecosystems.

Last year EnterWorks joined forces with WinShuttle, a major player in the data management realm.

This has led to that I, besides welcoming EnterWorks as a featured solution on the list, also is able to welcome EnterWorks to Europe. The European launch should have taken place on The Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in March. However, this event was as all other events at the moment postponed. But the launch is not. Read about the perspectives of this move in the press release on that Winshuttle Announces European Launch of EnterWorks® MDM/PIM Platform.

No One MDM Solution Can Fully Satisfy All Current and Future Use Cases

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The title of this post is taken from the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Master Data Management Solutions.

One implication of this observation is that you when selecting your solution will not be able to use a generic analyst ranking of solutions as examined in the post Generic Ranking of Vendors versus an Individual Selection Service.

Selection Model

This is the reason of being for The Disruptive MDM / PIM / DQM List.

Another implication is that even the best fit MDM solution will not necessarily cover all your needs.

One example is within data matching, where I have found that the embedded solutions in MDM tools often only have limited capabilities. To solve this case, there are best of breed data matching solutions on the market able to supplement the MDM solutions.

Another example close to me is within multienterprise (business ecosystem wide) MDM, as MDM solutions are focused on each given organization. Here your interaction with a trading partner, and the interaction by the trading partner with you, can be streamlined with a solution like Product Data Lake.

What is a Golden Record?

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The term golden record is a core concept within Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Quality Management (DQM). A golden record is a representation of a real world entity that may be compiled from multiple different representations of that entity in a single or in multiple different databases within the enterprise system landscape.

A golden record is optimized towards meeting data quality dimensions as:

  • Being a unique representation of the real world entity described
  • Having a complete description of that entity covering all purposes of use in the enterprise
  • Holding the most current and accurate data values for the entity described

In Multidomain MDM we work with a range of different entity types as party (with customer, supplier, employee and other roles), location, product and asset. The golden record concept applies to all of these entity types, but in slightly different ways.

Party Golden Record

Having a golden record that facilitates a single view of customer is probably the most known example of using the golden record concept. Managing customer records and dealing with duplicates of those is the most frequent data quality issue around.

If you are not able to prevent duplicate records from entering your MDM world, which is the best approach, then you have to apply data matching capabilities. When identifying a duplicate you must be able to intelligently merge any conflicting views into a golden record as examined in the post Three Master Data Survivorship Approaches.

In lesser degree we see the same challenges in getting a single view of suppliers and, which is one of my favourite subjects, you ultimately will want to have a single view on any business partner, also where the same real world entity have both customer, supplier and other roles to your organization.

Location Golden Record

Having the same location only represented once in a golden record and applying any party, product and asset record, and ultimately golden record, to that record may be seen as quite academic. Nevertheless, striving for that concept will solve many data quality conundrums.

Location management have different meanings and importance for different industries. One example is that a brewery makes business with the legal entity (party) that owns a bar, café, restaurant. However, even though the owner of that place changes, which happens a lot, the brewery is still interested in being the brand served at that place. Also, the brewery wants to keep records of logistics around that place and the historic volumes delivered to that place. Utility and insurance are other examples of industries where the location golden record (should) matter a lot.

Knowing the properties of a location also supports the party deduplication process. For example, if you have two records with the name “John Smith” on the same address, the probability of that being the same real world entity is dependent on whether that location is a single-family house or a nursing home.

Golden RecordsProduct Golden Record

Product Information Management (PIM) solutions became popular with the raise of multi-channel where having the same representation of a product in offline and online channels is essential. The self-service approach in online sales also drew the requirements of managing a lot more product attributes than seen before, which again points to a solution of handling the product entity centralized.

In large organizations that have many business units around the world you struggle with having a local view and a global view of products. A given product may be a finished product to one unit but a raw material to another unit. Even a global SAP rollout will usually not clarify this – rather the contrary.

While third party reference data helps a lot with handling golden records for party and location, this is lesser the case for product master data. Classification systems and data pools do exist, but will certainly not take you all the way. With product master data we must, in my eyes, rely more on second party master data meaning sharing product master data within the business ecosystems where you operate.

Asset (or Thing) Golden Record

In asset master data management you also have different purposes where having a single view of a real world asset helps a lot. There are namely financial purposes and logistic purposes that have to aligned, but also a lot of others purposes depending on the industry and the type of asset.

With the raise of the Internet of Things (IoT) we will have to manage a lot more assets (or things) than we usually have considered. When a thing (a machine, a vehicle, an appliance) becomes intelligent and now produces big data, master data management and indeed multi-domain master data management becomes imperative.

You will want to know a lot about the product model of the thing in order to make sense of the produced big data. For that, you need the product (model) golden record. You will want to have deep knowledge of the location in time of the thing. You cannot do that without the location golden records. You will want to know the different party roles in time related to the thing. The owner, the operator, the maintainer. If you want to avoid chaos, you need party golden records.

The Latest Constellation Research MDM Shortlist

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

The new Constellation Research generic shortlist for Master Data Management (MDM) is out.

Compared to the previous list Semarchy is a new entry which follows up their up-right move in The Latest Gartner MDM Magic Quadrant. So, another acknowledgement of the Semarchy Intelligent Data Hub concept. It is good to see that someone I started to blog about 8 years ago is now going to the top of the market.

Else IBM, Informatica, Reltio, Riversand, Stibo Systems and Tibco EBX stays on the list.

Constellation Research has now realized, like Gartner also did some while ago, that Oracle has left the MDM market. Thus the Oracle expansion on the previous shortlist is now followed up by a goodbye.

Fun fact: The guys who started Semarchy left Oracle a decade ago with the aim to build a better MDM solution as told by FX Nicolas of Semarchy in this interview.

Check out the Constellation Shortlist(tm) Master Data Management here.

Constellation MDM Shortlist 2020 Q1
Source: Constellation Research

MDM License Distribution

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Some of the hard facts presented in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management (MDM) Solutions is how the vendor licenses are distributed between the various master data domains. You can find these figures from the previous quadrant in the post Counting MDM Licenses.

The Latest MDM Magic Quadrant also includes these numbers. In order to highlight how the vendors have different profiles, let us concentrate on the innovative solutions registered on The Disruptive MDM / PIM / DQM List.

MDM License Distribution
Source: Gartner

The above figure shows the three domains where the vendor has sold the most licenses and how many customers who are handling multiple domains.

Contentserv is coming from a strong position in the Product Information Management (PIM) market and still have the vast part of licenses attached to product master data.

Enterworks is also coming from the PIM space and are with their ecosystem wide (or interenterprise as Gartner says) approach building up the multidomain grip through encompassing supplier master data.

Informatica is covering all domains with their suite of 360 solutions and have a good portion of customers doing multidomain MDM.

Reltio does cover all domains but are increasingly focusing on the customer domain with their connected customer 360 offering that encompasses all customer data.

Riversand is another vendor coming from the PIM space that is now growing into the multidomain MDM sphere with their new cloud-native platform.

Semarchy is with their Intelligent Data Hub concept going beyond multidomain MDM into handling more kinds of data as reference data and critical application data.

This diversity means that you cannot just use a generic ranking as presented in the magic quadrant when selecting the best fit solution for your intended solution. You must make a tailored selection.

Growth on the MDM Market

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

As reported yesterday a new Gartner MDM Magic Quadrant is out.

MDM Growth
MDM license and maintenance revenue in M USD and growth %. Source: Gartner.

While the change in positions is limited the change in market share is more significant, if we look at the license and maintenance revenue estimates provided by Gartner. The numbers included in the new quadrant published in January 2020 are 2018 estimates. The figure here compares those numbers to the 2017 numbers included in the previous quadrant published in December 2018.

The trend is that the largest providers are not growing as fast as some of the midsize providers, where Reltio, Ataccama and Semarchy are going in the fast lane.

If any of the solution providers have some 2019 updates, please comment here.

The Latest MDM Magic Quadrant

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl1 Comment

With some delay the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions has now been published and has began surfacing on the vendor websites.

I will get back with more take away. As a starter, a short look at the movements in the quadrant, where it can be observed that:

  • Informatica is heading towards the top-right corner
  • TIBCO Software has defended the second place held by Orchestra Networks following the take over
  • Semarchy is up in third position following the high jump into the challengers quadrant last year

MDM MQ 18 to 19Bigger picture here.

Download the report from Semarchy here or Informatica here.

It Is Black Friday and Cyber Monday All the Time at the Disruptive MDM / PIM / DQM List

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

The upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday are synonymous with good deals.

At the Disruptive MDM / PIM / DQM List there are good deals all the days.

As a potential buyer on the look for a solution covering your Master Data Management (MDM), Product Information Management (PIM) and/or Data Quality Management (DQM) needs you can use the free service that based on your context, scope and requirement selects the best fit solution(s). You can start here.

Black Friday

As a solution provider you can against a very modest fee register your solution here.

Happy Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Combining Data Matching and Multidomain MDM

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Data Matching GroupTwo of the most addressed data management topics on this blog is data matching and multidomain Master Data Management (MDM). In addition, I have also founded two LinkedIn Groups for people interested in one of or both topics.

The Data Matching Group has close to 2,000 members. In here we discus nerdy stuff as deduplication, identity resolution, deterministic matching using match codes, algorithms, pattern recognition, fuzzy logic, probabilistic learning, false negatives and false positives.

Check out the LinkedIn Data Matching Group here.

Multidomain MDM GroupThe Multi-Domain MDM Group has close to 2,500 members. In here we exchange knowledge on how to encompass more than a single master data domain in an MDM initiative. In that way the group also covers the evolution of MDM as the discipline – and solutions – has emerged from Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Product Information Management (PIM).

Check out the LinkedIn Multi-Domain MDM Group here.

The result of combining data matching and multi-domain MDM is golden records. The golden records are the foundation of having a 360-degree / single view of parties, locations, products and assets as examined in The Disruptive MDM / PIM / DQM List blog post Golden Records in Multidomain MDM.