The implementation of MDM can substantially improve supply chain visibility, as it allows for collaborations of product, customer, asset, and location-specific information to create contextualized data as the ultimate weapon against shifting market trends, ever-evolving regulation requirements, and macroeconomic uncertainty.
Navigating the complexities of today’s supply chains demands new levels of visibility and adaptability. Businesses and individuals face challenges from ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty, interest rate hikes, and inflation. Additionally, evolving regulations and consumer expectations regarding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria, along with Scope 3 emissions tracking, intensify the need for greater insight across the often-complex tiers of an organization’s supply chain.
As a result, organizations are presented with a headache of supply chain challenges – from reducing costs to ensuring regulatory compliance, all while keeping up with changing customer demands. This has created a need to streamline systems while adjusting operations to any other potential market shifts.
The solution: master data management
Many organizations are turning to multi-domain master data management (MDM) as a way to enhance their supply chain visibility and master the complexities of data management, content enrichment, and vendor collaboration. For supply chain management, a multi-domain MDM with Product Information Management (PIM) capabilities is especially powerful. MDM helps to clean, organize, and centralize the master files of attributes, such as product inventory, addresses, customer IDs, and item numbers.
A multi-domain MDM solution also enables teams to administerand observe various internal data domains from one individual platform. It can help authenticate inflowing data to ensure that it meets data quality standards and can trigger workflowsfor when incoming data requires further analysis, synchronization, and approval from other systems. This allows companies to produce an extensive overview of their master data, allowing said data to be utilized across different departments, processes, and channels simultaneously.
There are a number of ways this can be beneficial across different markets:
- Food distribution: Staying competitive, efficient, and compliant amid the unique challenges of food standards and logistics management.
- Consumer goods wholesale: Utilizing high-quality data to create personalized offers, brand messaging, and omnichannel experiences.
- Building materials: Managing thousands of different product SKUs for building parts, materials, equipment, and more with a single trusted data source.
- Medical & pharmaceuticals: Adhering to medical safety standards and ensuring life-saving goods are delivered exactly when, where, and how customers need them.
See also: Generative AI Brings Real-Time Supply Chains Closer to Reality
How multi-domain MDM helps organizations improve supply chain visibility
There are three main ways in which multi-domain MDM, including a PIM, improves supply chain visibility and unlocks greater value for organizations: it enhances collaboration with suppliers, improves data integrity, and reveals a greater location-based context.
Enhances collaboration with suppliers
Multi-domain MDM helps improve the collaboration organizations have with their suppliers, which in turn, improves visibility. For example, integrating supplier data into multi-domain MDM enables accurate tracking of inventory levels for each supplier. Having visibility into supplier inventory allows businesses to decide when to place orders to maintain stocked shelves, which is essential for fulfilling customer expectations for online orders and in-store pickups. Supplier portals also help to simplify and accelerate product onboarding and contribute to product content enrichment.
Access to the supplier data domain gives organizations crucial data, including performance metrics and contact information, in real time, enabling both stronger communication with suppliers and more informed decisions.
The improved nature of managing data leads to better supplier scorecards, performance monitoring, and product availability. This allows organizations to have a far more accurate understanding of the whole of their supply chain, increasing collaboration and effective communication.
Improves data integrity
Trusting the data you have to produce the insights you need into your supply chain is key to managing it. MDM helps to turn raw data into insights. To benefit from this, create a data supply chain that provides an easily searchable data portal to discover the data needed at each stage of the supply chain lifecycle.
The use of MDM in the data supply chain can substantially impact how an organization manages both its physical (e.g., tools and machinery) and intangible assets (e.g., patents). This is achieved by creating enriched, up-to-date insights into potential emerging trends and shifts in demand. The data supply chain consists of three parts: 1) data is created, captured, and collected; 2) the data is enriched, curated, controlled, and improved; 3) the data is utilized, consumed, and leveraged.
When mastered, this process ensures data integrity, making it easier for a distributor to stay fully informed with time-based renewals and any other potential requirements, ensuring safety standards are met in a timely manner, and operations run seamlessly.
Reveals greater location-based context
Emphasizing location domain within a multi-domain MDM implementation provides location-based context relationships to other data domains, such as products or suppliers. It can also help companies mitigate supply chain challenges. For example, companies can predict location-based risks and consequently adjust their supply chain model to counteract them before they occur, keeping them streamlined and more competitive.
The role that location data plays throughout the supply chain is also becoming more integral as consumer tastes and demands evolve. Precise, location-based information has become critical in last-mile deliveries, and capitalizing on this could be essential for streamlining an organization’s supply chain.
Staying ahead of the curve
Many distributors find themselves behind the industry curve in terms of efficiency as they continue to use outdated manual processes or back-office systems. However, those that utilize a multi-domain MDM that includes PIM capabilities have been able to unlock a new degree of power from their data, improving operational efficiency and diversifying the commerce experience.
For example, Graco Inc., a leading manufacturer and provider of premium pumps and spray equipment for the construction, manufacturing, processing, and maintenance industries, was experiencing major challenges in maintaining updated and accurate product information that was disrupting its supply chain operations. When the manufacturer implemented MDM, Graco was able to simplify the customer experience online, making product selection easier with faceted search and tags, and opened new sales channels, boosting revenue. Now, trading partners and distributors have access to the information they need to meet evolving and expanding customer expectations.
The implementation of MDM can substantially improve supply chain visibility, as it allows for collaborations of product, customer, asset, and location-specific information to create contextualized data as the ultimate weapon against shifting market trends, ever-evolving regulation requirements, and macroeconomic uncertainty.
