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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 (MDM) can mean different things to different organizations. Hii Retail is part of your MDM as long as it is involved in distributing your data to end consumers.

Definitions​

Some helpful definitions of 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., 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

What Does This Mean?​

Master Data is any entity data needed for daily business operations—such as Tax Rules, Deposit amounts, POSes, Items, Price Specifications, Assortment Policies, Business Units, and hierarchies. It is all the data that changes to keep your business operational and current.

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

What Master Data is NOT​

Transactional Data—data produced by business operations, usually constructed from Master Data.

Examples:

  • Sales transactions from a POS
  • Stock transactions from sales and replenishment processes