MDM

Buying a PIM Solution at Harrods

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl3 Comments

Today I attended the Informatica MDM Day for EMEA here in London.

London has a lot of attractions. If you for example want to see a lot of big price tags and go to a public toilet with a very nice odeur the place to go is the famous luxury department store called Harrods.

Harrods

Harrods, represented by Peter Rush, presented their Product Information Management (PIM) journey at the Informatica event. So, how does a luxury PIM implementation look like?

It starts with realising that traditional product master data in retail has mostly been about the buy-side, but today, not at least in light of the multi-channel challenge, you must add the sell-side to product master data, meaning having customer friendly product information.

After setting that scene Harrods went into selecting a PIM solution, meaning eliminating possible vendors one by one until the lucky one was chosen. In this case Heiler (now Informatica). In the last stages evaluated vendors were sent home based on criteria like roadmap, being in Texas and as the last step the price.

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Hierarchical Completeness within Product Information Management

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl5 Comments

Some years ago I wrote a blog post called Hierarchical Completeness. This post also had some excellent comments and David Loshin made a good follow up post called Hierarchy Data Completeness and Semantic Convergence.

HierarchyThe importance of hierarchical completeness, not at least within Product Information Management (PIM), has become close to me again.

It is a numbers game. Often having an advanced PIM solution on board is based by the fact that you have many products to manage. Too many products for a single data steward to control. Add to that today’s challenges of doing multi-channel business and tomorrows challenges of embracing social media engagement. This means a lot more attributes and digital assets per product and perhaps more products to manage as told in the post called Social PIM.

All products aren’t equal. The one size fits all term doesn’t apply to selling shoes or any other range of products. The attributes and assets needed differ per product categorization and so does the performance measures and expectations for each product.

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An Alternative Multi-Domain MDM Quadrant

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

No, this is not an(other) attempt to challenge Gartner, the analyst firm, in making quadrants about vendors in the Master Data Management (MDM) realm.

This an attempt to highlight some capabilities of Multi-Domain MDM solutions here focusing on party and product master data and the sell-side and the buy-side of MDM as discussed some years ago in the post Sell-side vs Buy-side Master Data Quality.

A simple quadrant will look like this:

Quadrant

  • The upper right corner is where MDM started, being with solutions back then called Customer Data Integration (CDI).
  • The Product Information Management (PIM) side is quite diverse and depending on the industry vertical where implemented:
    • Retailers and distributors have their challenges with sometimes high numbers of products that goes in and comes out as the same but with data reflecting different viewing points.
    • Manufacturers have other issues managing raw materials, semi-finished products, finish products and products and services used to facilitate the processes.
    • Everyone have supplies.
  • The supplier master data management has more or less also been part of the PIM space but looks more like customer master data and should be part of a party master data discipline also embracing other party roles as employee.

Also, this quadrant is by the way without other important domains as location (as discussed in the post Bringing the Location to Multi-Domain MDM) and asset (as discussed in the post Where is the Asset?)

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Sharing Product Master Data

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl11 Comments

One of the top challenges in product Master Data Management (MDM) is the sharing of master data attributes and digital assets across the ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users.

There seems to be a range of solutions emerging in order to cover that land. Three kinds of approaches will be:

  • Supplier engagement within Product Information Management (PIM) solutions.
  • Similar solutions within wider IT offerings.
  • Social PIM.

PIMMaster Data Management (MDM) platforms with strong offerings for the product domain comes with built-in functionality for engaging suppliers in the process of collecting product master data attributes and related materials as product sheets, images and other digital assets.

You may also find similar functionality within the broader software suites as for example the SAP Product Stewardship Network.

A somewhat different approach may be called Social PIM as explained in the post Time to Turn Your Product Master Data Social? Here the collection process is sort of independent of in-house systems. This may, in the long run, help with having your suppliers having to attend many different solutions and also help your customers depending on where you sit in the ecosystem.

What is your experience regarding sharing product master data?

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Bringing the Location to Multi-Domain MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl8 Comments

When we talk about multi-domain Master Data Management (MDM) we often focus on the two dominant MDM domains being customer (or rather party) MDM and product (or maybe things) MDM.

The location domain is the third bigger domain within MDM. Location management can be more or less complex depending on the industry vertical we are looking at. In the utility and telco sectors location management is a big thing. Handling installations, assets and networks is typically supported by a Geographical Information System (GIS).

Master Data Management is much about supporting that different applications can have a unified view of the same core business entities. Therefore, in the utility and telco sectors a challenge is to bring the GIS application portfolio into the beat with other applications that also uses locations as explained in the post Sharing Big Location Reference Data.

Location2

The last couple of days I enjoyed taking part in the Nordic user conference for a leading GIS solution in the utility and telco sector. This solution is called Smallword.

It is good to see that at least one forward looking organization in the utility and telco sector is working with how location master data management can be shared between business functions and applications and aligned with party master data management and product master data management.

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CRM systems and Customer MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl5 Comments

Last week I had some fun making a blog post called The True Leader in Product MDM. This post was about how product Master Data Management still in most places is executed by having heaps of MS Excel spreadsheets flowing around within the enterprise and between business partners, as I have seen it.

business partnersWhen it comes to customer Master Data Management MS Excel may not be so dominant. Instead we have MS CRM and the competing offerings as Salesforce.com and a lot of other similar Customer Relationship Management solutions.

CRM systems are said to deliver a Single Customer View. Usually they don’t. One of the reasons is explained in the post Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Data Quality. The way CRM systems are built, used and integrated is a certain track to create duplicates.

Some remedies out there includes periodic duplicate checks within CRM databases or creating a federated Customer Master Data Hub with entities coming from CRM systems and other databases with customer master data. This is good, but not good enough as told in the post The Good, Better and Best Way of Avoiding Duplicates.

During the last couple of years I have been working with the instant Data Quality service. This MDM service sits within or besides CRM systems and/or Master Data Hubs in order to achieve the only sustainable way of having a Single Customer View, which is an instant Single Customer View.

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The True Leader in Product MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl10 Comments

Magic Quadrants from Gartner are the leading analyst report sources within many IT enabled disciplines. This is also true in the data management realm and one of quadrants here is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions.

The latest version of this quadrant was out in November last year as reported in the post MDM for Product Data Quadrant: No challengers. A half visionary.

Most quotations after a quadrant release are vendors bragging about their position in the quadrant and this habit will possibly also repeat itself when the next quadrant for product MDM is out.

But I think Gartner has got it all wrong here during all the years. As I have seen it, Microsoft is the true leader and the rest of the flock are minor niche players.

Product MDM

Excel rules.

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Data Models and Real World Alignment

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl13 Comments

Usually data models are made to fit a specific purpose of use. As reported in the post A Place in Time this often leads to data quality issues when the data is going to be used for purposes different from the original intended. Among many examples we not at least have heaps of customer tables like this one:

Customer Table

Compared to how the real world works this example has some diversity flaws, like:

  • state code as a key to a state table will only work with one country (the United States)
  • zipcode is a United States description only opposite to the more generic “Postal Code”
  • fname (First name) and lname (Last name) don’t work in cultures where given name and surname have the opposite sequence
  • The length of the state, zipcode and most other fields are obviously too small almost anywhere

More seriously we have:

  • fname and lname (First name and Last name) and probably also phone should belong to an own party entity acting as a contact related to the company
  • company name should belong to an own party entity acting in the role as customer
  • address1, address2, city, state, zipcode should belong to an own place entity probably as the current visiting place related to the company

In my experience looking at the real world will help a lot when making data models that can survive for years and stand use cases different from the one in immediate question. I’m not talking about introducing scope creep but just thinking a little bit about how the real world looks like when you are modelling something in that world, which usually is the case when working with Master Data Management (MDM).

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Happy 10 Years Birthday MDM Solutions

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

326px-10piece-blank-R_k.svgEvery year Information Difference publishes a report about the Master Data Management (MDM) Landscape. This year’s report celebrates the 10th year of MDM solutions around. Of course, the MDM industry didn’t start on a certain date 10 years ago, but the use of MDM as a common accepted notation for a branch of IT solutions within data management, and in my eyes as a much needed spinoff of the data quality discipline, was commonly being accepted.

A birthday is a good occasion to look ahead. The Information Difference report takes on some of the trends in the MDM solutions around, being that:

  • Most MDM vendors today claims to be multi-domain MDM providers, but certainly they are on different stages coming from different places
  • Providing MDM in the cloud is slowly but steadily adapted
  • Integrating big data into MDM solutions has, in my words, reached the marketing and R&D departments at the MDM vendors and will someday also reach the professional service and accounting folks there

Read the MDM landscape Q2 2014 report from Information Difference here.

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Foreign Addresses

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

The New YorkerThere is a famous poster called The New Yorker. This poster perfectly illustrates the centricity we often have about the town, region or country we live in.

The same phenomenon is often seen in data management as told in the post Foreign Affaires.

If we for example work with postal addresses we tend to think that postal addresses in our own country has a well-known structure while foreign addresses is a total mess.

In Denmark where I am born and raised and has worked most of my life we have two ways of expressing an address:

  • The envelope way where there are a certain range of possibilities especially on how to spell a street name and how to write the exact unit within a high rise building, though there is a structure more or less known to native people.
  • The code way, as every street has a code too and there is a defined structure for units (known as the KVHX code). This code is used by the public sector as well as in private sectors as financial services and utility companies and this helps tremendously with data quality.

But around 3.5 percent of Danes, including yours truly, has a foreign address. And until now the way of registering and storing those addresses in the public sector and elsewhere has been totally random.

This is going to change. The public authorities has, with a little help from yours truly, made the first standard and governance principles for foreign addresses as seen in this document (in Danish).

At iDQ A/S we have simultaneously developed Master Data Management (MDM) services that helps utility companies, financial services and other industries in getting foreign addresses right as well.

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