Hilke Diepenbruck
(Marketing Manager EMEA at Stibo Systems)
Why/when should a company implement a MDM solution?
Using MDM, companies can unlock the full value of their information to drive better business outcomes – empowering users to act with confidence in their data, adapt quickly to changing market conditions, and go beyond the status quo to anticipate future market trends. Implementing MDM comes with numerous rewards. It has helped a global auto parts company increase the number of parts handled by 64% while decreasing returns 7%. It enabled a well-known online retailer in The Netherlands to reduce the time for product introduction by 80%. And, it helped a large consumer packaged goods manufacturer provide seamless brand experiences, quicker product introductions and a single, global version of the truth. A recent study by Aberdeen Group found that MDM can cut labour costs by 67%.
As businesses and their interactions with customers become increasingly digital around the globe, a wealth of master data is being created. Customer master data is generated by email signup forms, e-commerce sales, customer service calls and third-party sources. You might have hundreds of stores selling thousands of products – producing millions of individual details to manage across your inventory. This master data must be complete, accurate and consistent across the various systems you use to interact with customers, market and sell your products, support your partners and perform numerous business activities. Otherwise, your employees, your customers and your partners may be making decisions based on incomplete and inaccurate information.
Any company with shared master data across multiple business systems and processes can benefit from MDM. In simplest terms, master data is data shared across your business that describes attributes of key objects, such as products, customers, suppliers, locations, etc. Master data management (MDM) is the technology-enabled discipline that helps business and IT teams work together to ensure this master data is uniform, accurate and semantically consistent across the enterprise. In summary, if your company is producing master data across diverse systems across the enterprise, you can benefit in a big way from implementing MDM to push the boundaries of what you can achieve with your information assets.
What is the innovative character of your MDM solution?
Stibo Systems employs a Business-first mindset to move past “IT plumbing” and deploy a comprehensive MDM solution that is flexible and scalable enough to meet even the most demanding needs of diverse enterprises. By embracing this Business-first mindset in everything we do, we provide data management solutions allowing you to connect and deliver information to every point within your enterprise to drive value.
Our MDM solution is delivered on a single connected platform that seamlessly integrates critical multidomain data points, providing complete data/information visibility and connectivity across consumers, products, stores/locations, designers, supply chains and other domains to help customers make better, faster decisions. Our solution is also the only MDM offering that includes an integrated product lifecycle management (PLM) solution to enable customers to manage product data end-to-end, from ideation to commercialization.
Furthermore, Stibo Systems is a stable, privately held, AAA-rated company. We are run as a foundation, which allows us to focus on the long-term development of a strong product portfolio and obsess about servicing our customers – all without the interruptions of mergers and acquisitions.
Where do you see Master Data Management within five years?
We continue to see growing interest in MDM solutions from organizations around the globe, especially in key industries like retail, CPG and wholesale distribution, as well as in emerging markets like automotive, financial services and life sciences. In the past, businesses have primarily been focused on mastering a single domain, such as product or customer data. Increasingly, however, the benefits of managing multiple domains with a single system have led customers and prospects to tailor their search for MDM solutions that offer multidomain capabilities. We see this trend continuing to grow over the next five years.
We expect the popularity of delivering MDM capabilities on the cloud to continue to increase over the next few years. This has become an expectation in almost all our sales cycles today due to not only cost considerations but the flexibility it enables. As a result, we offer cloud-based options for our solution, as well as on-premise and a hybrid cloud model.
We are also continuing to see interest grow in the intersection of MDM and emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, machine learning and artificial intelligence. We see a lot of potential in this area as well and are investing in R&D to ensure our customers can capitalize on the benefits of these technologies in the coming years.
