MDM-in-a-BoxTM: A Modular Approach to Master Data Management
By Abhinay Verma, Sachin Malhotra, Souvik Mukherjee, Chinmay Mishra
As the concept of Master Data Management (MDM) has evolved and risen to mainstream status, more and more companies are enjoying its multiple business benefits, such as:
- Improved cross-sell/up-sell opportunities
- Enhanced customer insight
- Multi-channel integration
Cognizant's MDM-in-a-BoxTM is a proven and effective accelerator that facilitates any enterprise-wide MDM deployment. It helps:
- Reduce costs
- Shorten implementation time
- Ensure compliance
- Promote accurate decision making
- Enhance business performance
The MDM-in-a-BoxTM framework comprises three key components that form the foundation of any MDM implementation. They include:
- Cognizant professional services, including product attributes such as quality level, key features, styling, brand name, packaging, etc.
- Core MDM, which are the product's core benefits and problem-solving services.
- Business components, the value-added features such as industry-specific (retail, financial services, pharmaceutical, etc.) use cases.
These components are backed by Cognizant's consulting team and technological expertise.
Figure 1 - MDM-in-a-Box Components
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Innovation and MDM-in-a-Box
Reliable customer data positively impacts critical business functions. The real value of an organization's data is in the insights that can be extracted from it, and its subsequent contribution to business growth.
That is the overriding benefit of Master Data Management (MDM). It provides consistent, accurate, complete, timely and actionable master data that enables defined business objectives. But how can companies fully leverage MDM's benefits and convert them into monetized value?
At Cognizant, we believe that for MDM to be effective, it cannot be regarded as an IT-driven initiative. Successful MDM projects must:
- Gain secure buy-in from the business side as well as the IT organization
- Overcome perceptions of being complex and long term
- Dispel myths that they require an expensive platform and entail prohibitive costs of entry
Cognizant's MDM-in-a-Box is designed to meet those criteria. It defines an MDM initiative's business value upfront, then provides a business solution, not just a technical one. With MDM-in-a-Box, Global 1000 companies have realized ROI in 9 to 12 months of first-release implementation. This short turnaround time is enabled by solution accelerators such as:
- Customizable data stewardship user interface
- Reporting automation
- Scalable, SOA-compliant solution
- Configurable rules for business flexibility
Figure 2 - The incremental, evolutionary approach of MDM-in-a-Box
MDM-in-a-Box is both easier to use and faster to implement than "plain vanilla" implementations. It can be customized according to an organization's requirements, rather than building a solution from scratch. This highly flexible solution can be rolled out across data entities, business divisions and implementation styles, with these out-of-the-box features:
- A "pay-as-you-implement" model. MDM-in-a-Box reduces implementation costs by mitigating upfront costs. This reduces cost of entry for both large and midsize companies. Companies with large budgets prefer a long-term relationship; those with moderate budgets typically want a quick solution. MDM-in-a-Box addresses both.
- A 'three-pillar' advantage. The true value of MDM-in-a-Box lies in its ability to synchronize the three pillars of a company's services management framework: people, process and technology. This helps simplify corporate data, which is typically widely distributed and uncoordinated across the organization.
- A 'modular' framework. This framework includes industry-specific use cases for banking, insurance, retail and pharmaceutical companies.
In using MDM-in-a-Box, enterprises have a tool to follow the guidelines of successful MDM implementations. Those guidelines include:
- Avoid a "big-bang" replacement approach. Adopting a phased approach helps accommodate incremental changes that arise when no one process fits all. Multiple business objectives have different drivers and starting points. The idea is to start small and then grow.
- Empower enterprise IT to control and execute the initiative, ensuring both scope monitoring and a high level of commitment from stakeholders.
- Define KPIs for the MDM initiative, then monitor the result against stated objectives.
With its configured domain specific business cases, MDM-in-a-Box makes it easy to design an efficient data management process based on industry best practices. In one recent practical application, a top global life sciences company needed centralized MDM to:
- Support standardized customer relationship solutions
- Propel improved revenue growth
- Ensure higher degrees of customer satisfaction
The company realized that it could achieve these goals by teaming with key business and IT stakeholders across regions, and by partnering with Cognizant. Implementing MDM-in-a-Box with a multi-continent, multi-wave delivery model, we provided the following benefits for the company:
- Improved data insight, with:
- Holistic view of global data, with history data following a standard nomenclature
- Better strategies to improve customer relationships across all touch points, resulting in improved service levels
- Global standardization of customer-centric business processes
- More effective BI and Analytics processes
- Improved compliance
- Economies of scale, due to a single global system rather than multiple aggregator systems across geographies and business functions.
- Global standardization, with:
- Reduced build/maintenance costs
- Decommissioned local data repositories
- Common integration platform with re-usable interfaces and data distribution processes
- No point solutions or redundant infrastructure
- Global data governance strategy
- Centralized data audit processes
- Implementation cost benefits such as core design and requirements (supplemented by localization requirements) and repeatable development and testing methodology.
- Improved customer profiling across markets, with:
- Better customer segmentation
- More focused and cost-effective sales and marketing campaigns
- Updated key customer events
Implications for the Future of Work
As MDM evolves from a mere data source to a strategic corporate asset, the MDM-in-a-Box framework is aligning with one of the core elements of the Future of Work: Cloud Computing. New Cognizant solutions can facilitate MDM as a key enabler in the Cloud Computing domain. In the near future, accurate data consolidated from multiple CRM systems will be sent to the Cloud from the MDM hub.
Cognizant also plans to develop further MDM-in-a-Box modules for a broad range of future industry challenges. This will create a roadmap for successful enterprise-wide MDM deployment across a range of key industries. Already,
MDM-in-a-Box has achieved a perceptible improvement on the operations of enterprises across various sectors.
In Banking and Financial Services, for example, organizations are using MDM-in-a-Box to achieve such benefits as:
- Compliance enablement for Know Your Customer (KYC) processes and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) flagging
- Enhanced data stewardship for greater control over critical data changes and hierarchy management
- Advanced search and reporting, providing better insight into customer data
- Flexible data integration, easing the integration of data from multiple systems
In the Pharmaceuticals industry, Cognizant foresees customer master solutions becoming key enablers as companies become more customer-centric. The first generation of these solutions was used extensively to manage customer-related information and support the sales and marketing functions. Going forward, we see the pharma industry using this information to achieve sales and marketing process efficiencies—as well as to drive regulatory compliance assurance, Key Account Management (KAM), and Key Opinion Leader (KOL) management.
With MDM-in-a-Box, companies can redefine data governance processes and realize the following benefits:
- Strategic benefits - As a rapid-deploy solution that addresses key requirements of organizations in specific verticals—such as life sciences, healthcare, retail and financial services—MDM-in-a-Box:
- Has pre-loaded business enablement modules to help implement projects in less time
- Features easier business justification and more visible ROI than other MDM solutions
- Allow for faster sell into stakeholders, due to a lower-risk solution
- Is an industry-specific data model, with best-in-class design principles
- Business benefits - MDM-in-a-Box can reduce costs and shorten implementation time for a typical enterprise-wide MDM deployment by:
- Reducing complexity and risks, through its modular and focused approach
- Reducing time to implement an MDM solution
- Reducing cost of implementation
- Featuring a domain-specific MDM roadmap
- IT benefits - MDM-in-a-Box represents a solid first step towards building out a more comprehensive initiative. It provides:
- Enhanced data stewardship of Master Data for critical data changes and security
- A scalable, SOA-compliant solution
- Reporting automation
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Figure 3 - MDM-in-a-Box offers industry-specific components