White Papers

Ventana Research: Delivering Value with Master Data Management

As information becomes an increasingly important asset, organizations need to enhance its value through comprehensive, consistent management. Uncontrolled data sources that are hard to access and integrate for applications, BI tools and business processes generate unproductive costs, not just in overhead but also in lost business opportunities. MDM initiatives can help organizations capture the full value of their data sources and also protect sensitive data from a variety of threats and regulatory violations. Proper attention to data relationship discovery will increase the pace at which they can apply MDM to improve knowledge of their data.

Neil Raden, Hired Brains Research: Data Relationship Discovery: The First Step in Data Management and A Major Leap Beyond Profiling

It’s time to put the computers to work to uncover the hidden business rules, transformations, concatenations, substrings and all other manner of data mischief that exists between systems. What this paper is about is using the wealth of resources at our disposal, computers, memory, storage, networks, bandwidth and software to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of our data and ramp up data integration to meet today’s accelerating requirements.

Cross-system source data discovery and data mapping are two of the most important, and the most overlooked, steps in a master data management (MDM) implementation. Before you can populate a new master with “trusted” data, you need to analyze the potential source data systems individually, and you must perform cross-system analysis to determine the survivorship rules that will determine which data, under which circumstances, will be used to populate the master.

Exeros: Cross-System Data Consistency: Improving the Quality of Business Critical Data Flows

When you think about improving the quality of data within your business critical processes, what do you think about? Industry analysts and thought leaders tend to focus on only two aspects of data quality. The first is completeness. Does a table of data contain all of the required data elements and the required records? The second is data accuracy, and even more specifically, the accuracy of names and addresses.

Success Stories

Fortune 100 companies have used Exeros products to accelerate such data-intensive projects as:

• IT Asset Master Consolidation
• Master Data Management
• SAP Migration
• Data Consistency Validation

http://www.exeros.com/html/case_studies.asp

MDM Topic Page

Exeros products provide a unique capability to automatically perform source data discovery prior to MDM deployment and downstream system data mapping after an MDM solution is deployed.

http://www.exeros.com/html/data_management.asp

White Papers

Master Data Management and Accurate Data Matching

With a master data management (MDM) solution that uses an accurate matching process, you can link your data across systems to unlock the power of your critical data assets. This paper covers several MDM topics, including:

• The roadblocks to a complete customer
  view and coming to grips with data integrity
• Unifying customer records to improve data integrity through accurate data matching
• Comparison functions, thresholds and scoring with master data management

How to Pick the Best MDM Solution

Picking a master data management (MDM) solution that’s right for your business can be a daunting task. This paper poses the essential questions to ask when selecting a vendor to ensure that your solution offers the most:

• Accuracy - Accurately match and link the right data, presenting the right customer
• Scalability & Performance – As your needs or data change, adapt without compromising performance
• Speed & Ease of Implementation – Must you modify or standardize existing data? How long till ROI?

Podcasts

Where to Start in MDM

Marty Moseley, Initiate Systems’ chief technology officer, encourages you to go after something that matters to your enterprise. In this segment, you’ll learn about some common questions you might ask while choosing an area for your first MDM deployment:

• Identifying Outside Constraints such as Regulatory, Customer, or Supply Chain pressures
• Identifying Areas of Cost or Risk that Impact your Business
• Identifying Opportunities for doing something that shows value to a broad segment of your enterprise

Iterating Your Way Through Master Data Management

Master data management is a complex, multi-step undertaking. In this podcast, Marty Moseley, chief technology officer at Initiate Systems, gives you valuable tips for taking manageable bites out of MDM so you can realize positive results in shorter timeframes.

Success Story

Humana Benefits from Data Consolidation Efforts; Increases Accuracy and Visibility of Provider Information

Software provides Humana, one of the nation’s largest health benefits companies, with automated provider identification across numerous systems

Background: As one of the nation’s largest publicly traded health and supplemental benefits companies, Humana has 11.4 million medical members across a network of more than 550,000 physicians, hospitals, pharmacies and ancillary care providers in nearly every state.

Challenge: After years of rapid growth, Humana’s provider data was housed across multiple systems and locations, posing challenges to data analytics and effective resource management.

Solution: Initiate software is enabling Humana to link records across a variety of systems for a multitude of initiatives, including provider data maintenance, provider customer service and provider analytics.

MDM Topic Page

Initiate Systems is the leader in Master data management (MDM) solutions. Our software provides a trusted system of record for each customer, household, company or other entity by accurately identifying the relevant duplicate and fragmented records and linking them. within and across data sources. This helps unlock the value of your data for competitive advantages or operational improvements.

Learn more about how Initiate's MDM solutions can help your business improve cross-selling, up-selling and decision making to support loyalty programs and fraud protection while enhancing customer service and reducing marketing expenses.

http://www.initiatesystems.com/solutions/mdm/Pages/MDMTopics.aspx