Consistent product master data across the sales front ….today’s necessity!
As consumers we have increasingly become used to the idea of having a same product available to us across different stores or channels from the same selling company. And we expect consistent product information available to us across these sales channels.
It is easy to put off a customer when the two arms of the selling organization give inconsistent or incomplete information on the same product.
These inconsistencies, bewildering as it might be to the customers are easy for an IT practitioner like me to understand. It’s a case of product data lying in silos or lack of master data management (MDM) at the organization level.
Even as companies are waking up to the need for MDM at organizational level there is still a long way before we reach the desired state. In a recent experience of dealing with the Fortune 100 company, I discovered that the most simple reason for inconsistency of data. The selling channels e.g. distributors have the flexibility of picking the product master information as per their needs, basically only information which they need to make the sale. The logic at one hand might be preventing a data overload to the distributor systems and reducing manual effort since the data transfer was a manual process there. On the other hand the process simply ensures inconsistent or incomplete product data across the selling front since it depends on the distributors judgment of essential product data.
The need for a master data management strategy is pretty apparent in such a case. But what would be some of the measures as part of this strategy? Let’s list out some of them.
- Standardize the master data set needed for the selling arms across the organization. So that all the selling channels have a consistent set of product data. Baring of course any channel or geography specific content.
- Automate the process of sharing of product data across the selling arms. The manual effort of data sharing can leave the product data sharing dependant on the evening schedules of the person/s responsible for the data transfer!
- Implement a Master data management product solution in the organization. An MDM product can assist in standardizing data and sharing the same across the organization and systems.
- Have an IT systems strategy which can ensure that hardware and software purchase or developments are planned with the intent of having as much uniformity as possible across the organization. A set of disparate best of breed applications, which have limited capabilities to talk to each other can lead to creation of data silos.
Bringing consistency across the sale channel can be comforting to a customer and could be one of the reasons for a customer choosing a company’s product!
