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What is Master Data and Master Data Management

What is Master Data and Master Data Management

Master Data and Master Data Management can mean different things to different people and organizations. Hii Retail will be part of your Master Data Management as long as it becomes part of the pipeline for distributing your data to your end consumers.

So what is Master Data and Master Data Management (MDM)? Here are some definitions that might help us to understand what we mean with MDM and Master Data:

  • “A set of disciplines, processes and technologies, for ensuring the accuracy, completeness, timeliness and consistency of multiple domains of enterprise data - across applications, systems and databases, and across multiple business processes, functional areas, organizations, geographies and channels.” — Dan Power CEO, Hub Designs

  • “MDM is the practice of defining and maintaining consistent definitions of business entities, then sharing them via integration techniques across multiple IT systems within an enterprise and sometimes beyond to partnering companies or customers” — Philip Russom Ph.D. Industry Analyst, TDWI

  • “MDM is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts.” — Gartner

So what does this mean for us? Well, Master Data is basically any kind of entity data that is needed for the business to do its daily operations. That means anything from Tax Rules, Deposit amounts, POSes, Items, Price Specifications, Assortment Policies, Business Units and hierarchies that define the data you as a business need to manage your data and distribute it across all systems that you used.

Or, put in another way, all the data that is ever-changing to keep your business operational and current with the domain you operate your business in.

MDM typically delivers a "hub" infrastructure to source and distribute master data.

What Master Data is NOT​

Transactional Data - Transactional Data is data produced by the business and will most likely be constructed from Master Data.

Typical examples would be:

  • Sales transactions produced in a POS
  • Stock transactions produced by sale and replenishment processes