Tag: SCV

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What is People Master Data Management?

People Master Data Management (PMDM) is the process of collecting, storing, maintaining, and using data about employees, contractors, partners, or customers of an organization.

In the Pretectum Master Data Management context this data can include personal information such as name, date of birth, address, and contact details, as well as employment information such as job title, department, and salary.

The purpose of PMDM is to ensure that accurate and up-to-date information is available for various business processes, such as HR management, payroll processing, and customer relationship management.

PMDM is a critical component of an organization’s overall data management strategy, as it helps to ensure data quality and consistency, improves the accuracy of business decisions, and enables better collaboration and communication between different departments and stakeholders.

Effective PMDM also supports regulatory compliance, reduces the risk of data breaches, and helps organizations make the most of their human capital.

An effective PMDM ideally needs to support a number of key capabilities.

The optimal PMDM supports the creation and maintenance of people or person records in a controlled and high quality way within the system. This requires the presence of a centralized repository for collecting and storing data about the people who are either employees, contractors, partners, or customers.

Built-in validation rules in the PMDM ensures the data that is captured is accurate and consistent. This means that it should also have the capability to detect and reject duplicates, missing information, or inconsistent data.

By leveraging a data model, or in Pretectum speak, a schema, the PMDM is able to standardize the data and in particular is able to convert dates into a uniform format or standardize the way addresses are created and maintain. This could integrate with data validation sets from USPS, Royal Mail, AusPost and others. Standards ensure data quality and consistency of the data for use across the organization.

On premise PMDM systems should be reasonably expected to have robust security features, this is often native to platforms like the Pretectum SaaS offering. This includes encryption, access control, and audit trails,. All of these features serve to protect sensitive data and ensure regulatory compliance.

Data Integration of the PMDM allows integration with other systems, such as HR management, payroll processing, and CRM, ERP, CDP etc, to ensure effective use of the people data across the organization.

Just as with any centralized master data management system, the PMDM needs to have some data reporting and analytics to help the organization make informed decisions based on the data. The ability to generate various reports, such as demographic reports, salary reports, and turnover reports, to help organizations understand people data.

A PMDM system must have a clear governance structure, with defined roles and responsibilities for managing and using the data. This helps to ensure that the data is used effectively, ethically, and in compliance with regulations.

Any PMDM system should be user-friendly and intuitive, with an easy-to-use interface for both data entry and reporting. This helps to ensure that users are able to effectively use the system and contribute to the accuracy of the data.

To learn how you might use Pretectum as a PMDM, contact us today and consider a free trial evaluation.

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Customer Fundamentals – time to take a big step

muscular female dancer rehearsing in spacious studio

Master Data Management may be positioned as a “silver bullet” for the woes of poor customer master data but it doesn’t solve long-standing systemic organizational deficiencies.

Any organization embarking on any kind of Master Data Management (MDM) initiative will need to look long and hard at a number of characteristics of how data is created, described and managed that are independent of the MDM itself if they wish to get the best value from their MDM.

That highly desirable 360º view of the customer, for example, what is it exactly?

Benefits as described by vendors and industry experts are numerous, but perhaps a small handful is the most important and most achievable.

  • Reducing the costs and risks of customer data ownership
  • Reducing friction in transacting or engaging with the customer
  • Improved customer segmentation and targeting lists

All three of these outcomes are however heavily contingent on a number of important behaviours and organizational culture shifts.

While business leaders focus on strategic objectives and how performance metrics demonstrate the business value they will also be looking at hard metrics that can be used to baseline the status quo and then reveal improvements after the implementation of a master data management governance initiative.

None of the statements of benefit outlined above is specific enough to fall in line with the leadership needs of hard numbers but they could be further refined in order to be more specific and measurable.

Real business value drivers at best will be lagging indicators such as customer retention and increased revenue but it may also prove to be challenging directly attributing these to an MDM implementation program. In itself, an MDM program implementation may also not be able to guarantee these benefits.

While the outcomes may be a little fuzzy and difficult to guarantee, the fact of the matter is that there will be improved clarity on the state of the data and the potential in terms of analytics and insights from the customer data that may not presently exist.

Clarity on customer behaviour and the potential for predicted behaviour is really only possible if you have the data and in particular, have a unified repository of complete and appropriate customer data.

A structurally and semantically consistent customer master data view can often produce welcome side benefits such as:

  • Appropriate data acquisition valuation
  • Reduced M&A costs
  • Improved regulatory compliance (GDPR, CPA, HIPAA etc)
  • Improved employee productivity (Service, Support, Collections, Sales & Marketing)
  • Reduced fraud risk
  • Increased customer revenue
  • Optimized outbound marketing spend
  • Improved billing and collections
  • Improved sales and service execution

It is important to remember that any MDM tool itself will not guarantee any particular results if the program is implemented without careful consideration of the organizational context. For this, an assessment of the customer master data management maturity is an important first step in any implementation.

Targeting thoroughly practical, data-oriented benefits as part of a Customer MDM initiative will help align organizational expectations with the capabilities of any given solution. This in turn will lead to the most obvious and verifiable information-based outcomes that will inform the business and empower staff.

To ensure appropriate MDM adoption, it needs to effectively deliver on a recipe with repeatable and scalable outcomes that encourage adoption and support from all key stakeholders and data users.

We believe that with the Pretectum CMDM, a narrowly focused Customer Master Data Management platform, you can take bold first steps toward organizational change and an improved closeness to your customers. Contact us today to learn more.

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The case for CMDM in your existing systems landscape

hot air ballons in the sky

Ask any hill-walker or mountaineer why they do what they do and the answer you get might be surprising. Sometimes the main reason that they do what they do is for where the journey ultimately takes them.

Do you know why the view from the top is worth the climb? This is because it gives you a single view of everything laid out before you. It is the same appeal as ballooning and even flying for some…

The same is true with Master Data Management. The “hard climb” to a unified single source of customer data, gives you a single ‘clear’ picture of the customer.

The goal of every business is to acquire customers, give a top-notch customer experience, and retain customers while acquiring more. To achieve this goal, you’d have to crank up your data strategy to align with your business strategy.

It is worthy of note, though, that many businesses already have their customer data stored across many different systems, making it easily accessible for various teams and departments in the organization.

That, indeed, is good thinking. But is that really enough? Does that give a ‘view from the top’? Think of it this way, if a customer’s data is updated in one of the many systems available in your organization, that change would not automatically reflect across other systems, would it? In all likelihood not.

If you have adopted Customer Master Data Management in your business as a master system where all customer data is collated, updated, and reflected from every single system across the company, centralized, accurate, and consistent then you are at a distinct advantage when compared with your competitors who may still be at the bottom of the hill.

Without consistency across systems, business decisions will be made based on faulty or inaccurate data. And this could have catastrophic consequences for a business, like giving a bad customer experience, resulting in poor customer retention, which in turn leads to revenue loss.

Another major challenge that Customer Master data Management solves is the potential for a personalized customer experience. Customers anticipate experiences that are valuable and relevant to their needs. They expect brands to know them enough to deliver an overall excellent personalized experience.

Personalizing customer experience can be difficult when your data resides in numerous disconnected systems and in departments that don’t communicate with each other in real time. With CMDM, a single yet overall view of customers, related to their buying patterns, choices and preferences is the goal. This ensures that businesses can predict and pitch products or services that are most likely to match their customers’ needs.

Today, there are so many businesses out there taking advantage of different business strategies and isolated repositories. Customers have many options to choose from in terms of who they choose to do business with. What sets you apart from your competitors should be your accurate, high-quality data, that gives you insight into who your customers are, what they want, where they want it, and how they want it.

The only thing standing in your way to staying fixed in the heart of your customers. is your Customer Master Data Management. If your Organization embraced CMDM today, you wouldn’t be at the level of other businesses. Instead, you’d be standing right high up with a 360-degree view of your customers, driving new business opportunities. And in that instance, you’d realize, it was worth the climb!

Find out how Pretectum CMDM can help your business climb that hill or mountain.