Master Data Migration
A Complete Solution for Master Data Profiling, Cleansing, and Migration

In today's E‐commerce driven environment, data gets embedded into every aspect of our daily activity, and the ability to identify and maintain the One Single Source of Truth, "master data," is the driver of every aspect of Commerce. The need for properly managing this Single Source of Truth is paramount for organizations. However, instances are aplenty where companies struggle to secure this Single Source of Truth while addressing the need to integrate and implement updates from various disparate sources of inputs and then upload their product data at the customer-facing visual applications such as webpages, catalogs, and storefronts. Creating the single source of truth further gets complicated due to the need to manage this data for the global variance and needs of weights, measures, and regulations, including cultural and language requirements.

Master Data Migration (MDM) was founded to address this problem for creating a methodology to get to the SINGLE SOURCE of TRUTH. Today, the company gets widely recognized for its turnkey software solution—Accord 360—that simplifies master data projects.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Jayant Mehta, President, MDM, and Abbha Mathur, Product Manager, MDM, shed light on how their Accord 360 solution equips companies with a single source of truth.

Please give us a brief overview of MDM and the factors that led to the company's conception?

A few years ago, we worked for a company using a leading PIM solution for their master data management project. We realized several issues with the projects' master data, and there was no simple method to obtain the single source of truth. Even though they had assigned several tech personals to fix it, they could not resolve the issue entirely in no small part due to a lack of communication between the IT team and product managers to figure out if the fix was working. It never reached a point where the Master Data was correct, and the company continued using it with many discrepancies. As a result, they never reached the single definitive source of truth. At this point, we came up with the idea to create a system of solutions that will collect data from disparate sources and unify it on a platform while allowing technology personnel to apply permutations and combinations to this unified data and come up with a single source of truth.

Accord 360 is designed to support all ERP/MDM on-premises or cloud solutions, including SAP S/4, Oracle, Salesforce, Netsuite, and others. Accord 360 serves as a staging area, receives master data from all the disparate sources, assimilates the data in the proper templates based on the needs of the future state before moving them into the position of a Single Source of Truth. Our core competencies include master data profiling, conversion, and migration, and implementing various master data solution programs. We offer our services to any business with a customer-facing app, including manufacturing, retail, finance, and services, medical devices, industrial tools, food processing sectors.

Please identify the barriers to one-time master data migration.

• Most application vendors and system integrators do not take up master data migration tasks and leaves them to the customer.

• Members lack Knowledge about legacy master data which becomes very difficult to extract.

• Consolidating master data from disparate sources into a centralized repository is unmanageable.

• Mergers and acquisitions can complicate the present landscape of product portfolios.

• Difficulty validating converted master data as the business user does not know what to look for and approve.

• Complex transformation logic is regularly needed to get the desired outcome in the new target system.

• New Attributes in the target application require complex derivation from several attributes.

• Legacy-to-target reviews are essential to map existing values into target equivalent values in the new system can become tiresome.

• Master data migration delays are more costly for an organization and can disrupt the overall rollout of new master data solutions.

• Enterprise and reporting applications get highly impacted by the poor data quality of legacy master data.

• Cannot maintain data quality periodically and systematically.

Please identify the barriers to real-time master data migration.

• Disparate source applications create and publish entire master data record feeds, causing enormous loads on master data solutions causing.

• Disparate source applications publish master data in different data formats (e.g., JSON, XML, .csv) that need to be converted by the middleware to support the target master data solution need dedicated resources to monitor.

• Mergers and acquisitions can complicate the present landscape of product portfolios in the target application.

• Complex transformation logic is regularly needed to get the desired outcome in the new target system.

• Building middleware solution delays are more costly for an organization and can disrupt the overall rollout of inbound integration from source applications and outbound integrations to various commercial applications.

• Data quality validations can reject an entire master data record or file, causing manual rework.

How does Accord 360 mitigate these barriers?

• Accord 360 can connect to any data source and support all file formats (JSON, XML, .csv).

• Accord 360 can stage a large volume of master data from various source applications to process.

• Accord 360 can profile and correct data quality and validation issues in real-time.

• Accord 360 can publish new or delta master records in a set schedule.

• Accord 360 can receive master data in any data format (e.g., JSON), validate and publish accurate master data in a different format (e.g., XML)

• Accord 360 is a service and subscription model hosted on Azure.

Please tell us more about Accord 360 and its features and benefits?

Analytics coming from any data is only as good as the data. The term BIG DATA should be re-coined TRUE BIG DATA. Accord 360 ensures that companies can first build accurate and robust "master data," ensuring that correct master data gets presented to the customer and the analytics generated are accurate and reliable.

Our platform identifies typical issues at the classification level and reports master data that contain duplicates, inaccurate and missing or unused attribute values, to name a few.

As a simple example, a shirt can have many sizes, colors, and layouts. We put all of that on a simple visual user interface in which the client can easily recognize the missing color, size, or any attribute they want to see. Consequently, they can enter the data and complete it to ensure the reliability of data analytics, which drives the customer's forecast, supply chain, company's viability, and ultimately the company's profitability.

Our goal is to address clients' unorganized master data specifically. We look at all the disparate sources of inbound data coming in from vendors, manufacturing processes, raw materials and organize them in a staging area, correct, add, format, and place the data on the staging template of clients' future master data vision. Finally, it gets moved into the ONE Single Source of Truth or master data solution. We enable clients to seamlessly move their data into their ERP / MDM systems, web solutions, catalogs, or any customer-facing presentation. The analytics obtained through accurate data allows clients to project the demand requirements to manage their supply chain to meet their sales forecasts precisely. What differentiates us in the market is our capabilities of building the foundation block for an effective data analytics program.

Please share a customer success story where Accord 360 helped clients address the challenges they face?

A leading retail manufacturing company had multiple source applications generating master data in different formats across various stages of their product, from designing, manufacturing to commercialization. This massive amount of data published to their master data solution in various formats caused severe data quality issues, affecting master data solution performance. Accord 360 collected master data from all source applications in real-time, profiled, normalized, and cleaned it before placing it in the staging template. The platform then published the improved and high‐quality data as the new / delta, creating the single source of truth in the modern product information management (PIM) solution.

What does the future hold for MDM?

Over the last four to five years, we have perfected the art of analyzing the inbound data coming in any format, preparing them for the staging area, and moving them to any master data solution. We have made significant progress at making our solution regulatory compliant so clients can seamlessly manage and present their products to their global customers. Our current expansion plan supports building connectors for major ERP and MDM application vendors to help real-time integration. We have built a connector to publish new/delta master data from SAP S/4 to any PIM Solution and vice-versa. We aim to let the imagination of the product managers flow so they can design and offer products to customers as they desire without any apprehension. We can work with them independent of their current IT system integrators, focus on their data quality issues and move their data to future compliance without losing a heartbeat.

Summarizing

Organizations encounter difficulty managing their master data in real-time or at one time.

Establishing a master data quality strategy on the legacy data is critical before moving to any modern master data solution.