In my last blog - Game-changers in the Cloud Focus on CRM - Part I, I had written about a new offering from Salesforce.com named DRO (Data Residency Option) or On-premise storage of data at customer location. Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO had classified this offering for few large Salesforce customers who have data security or IP related issues with deployment of their key data on cloud. This development created a lot of buzz and the feature is expected to be officially available in 2012 i.e. this year. Hence, I found it wise to dig deeper and ponder on what is the technology backbone of DRO and what strategic benefits will Salesforce achieve after its acquisition of Navajo Systems, who were the owning company to this data storage and encryption technology.

Master Data Management Solution for a Supplier Hub
Supplier hub is an application that unifies and shares critical information about an organization's supply base. It does this by enabling customers to centralize all supplier information from heterogeneous systems and thus creates a single view of supplier information that can be leveraged across all functional departments.

In the last part, we discussed about the practical supply chain issues for the enterprises and their MDM solutions. In this part, we will look into the business benefits as well as the functional benefits of the proposed MDM solutions.

Business Benefits of Master Data Management
Below are some of the business benefits of master data management

• Data Consolidation from M&A
  MDM defines a single, trustworthy version of important enterprise master data

In the last part, we discussed the supply chain pain points that modern enterprises face. In this part, we will look into the key supply chain practical issues and their MDM solutions.

Practical supply chain issues and their MDM solutions
Practical issue 1: A retailer's distribution center (DC) in X city has its operations shut down for an extended period of time due to a hurricane. Unfortunately, the retailer is unable to shift distribution for those regional stores because its store-order codes are a combination of item codes and the supplying DC's codes. Changing the distribution channel requires changing the order guides, which for most organizations is a herculean task. The delay leads to empty shelves, lost sales, unhappy customers and irreparable brand damage.

In the last part, we discussed about how CRM is bound by the feeling of the consumers. To understand the same, we tried to focus on the 7 O's framework of consumer behaviour on which the marketing managers rely on for establishing a strong relationship with their customers. In this part, let us try and analyze on the basis of the 7 O's framework how the atom of CRM - feeling plays a key role in the relationship management of the customer.

Many companies have IT systems that are inflexible, antiquated and are difficult and expensive to enhance, maintain and support. Such organizations have difficulty managing the data associated with their operations. Data ownership, fragmentation across systems, multiple points of failure and data inconsistency is among the problems that lead to product quality and recall situations in their supply chain. Master Data Management can be effectively leveraged to solve these issues through data standardization, data integrity and presenting a single source of truth. The blog provides a brief of the typical pain points that the complex supply chains of the companies today face.