Procurement functions, either provided by ERP or stand-alone systems can streamline the process of setting up a buying relationship with a supplier, but do not ensure full supplier visibility across departments and systems, nor the complex relationships between suppliers such as joint ventures, etc. Without consistency and complete visibility, supplier or supplier subsidiaries may be set up multiple times, and often under less adventitious terms.

Furthermore, aggregate spend can be obscured, limiting your organization’s ability to negotiate best terms and pricing. A robust master data approach to suppliers ensures complete supplier visibility across all systems, departments, and functions, and can also provide a comprehensive view into aggregate spend, not only with individual suppliers but also aggregated up through corporate hierarchies. Done well, this represents huge impact to the bottom line.

With customer data residing in individual silos of sales, support, marketing, service, warranty, and other systems, updates to critical operational information regarding customers may or may not trickle through to the necessary systems. The net result is that invoices may be incorrect or are sent to the wrong address, orders get shipped to the wrong location, or incorrect taxes are withheld.

These operational headaches are the result of inconsistent information across systems, and can highly costly month in and month out. Leading organizations have recognized that maintaining consistency of critical customer data is paramount, and must be facilitated even when updates to customer information may occur within any of the myriad of systems maintaining customer data.

Master data management ensures that updates from all systems are captured, vetted, and then shared across the entire IT ecosystem, preventing operational headaches before they start.