By Mohammed Sabir
Integrating data and applications isn’t enough to run a truly data-driven enterprise.
To excel, it’s essential to build on integration with master data governance that maximizes the value of your data by ensuring that it’s consistent, accurate, and up to date across your business systems.
Done right, master data governance delivers the desired single source of truth. Teams in areas such as finance, sales, operations, professional services, and customer support all work with the same trusted information, regardless of which application they’re using.
At OSI Digital, a top-level Boomi Elite partner providing business and technology solutions, we’re seeing more and more clients recognizing the importance of master data governance for several reasons:
- Cost-efficiency improves when staff no longer needs to manually reconcile conflicting data, such as customer addresses and products purchased, across systems.
- Data accuracy increases, helping sustain a superior experience for customers and suppliers experience by minimizing the risk of incorrect ordering and billing or other issues.
- Your enterprise has a high degree of data readiness, with a 360-degree view of trusted data sets for analytics and informed decision making at both tactical and strategic levels.
From Data Glut to Data Readiness
The stakes are rising as companies pursue digital transformation with a large-scale shift from legacy to cloud systems. Rising volumes of data end up scattered across siloed cloud and on-premises platforms and applications, undermining transformation efforts with a glut of contradictory data.
Those issues are complicated further during a merger or acquisition. A buyer acquiring a competitor faces challenges around quickly integrating information and ensuring data quality, especially when it comes to customer information.
A recent article in CIO magazine by veteran technology journalist John Edwards summarized the problems well:
“Data is an enterprise’s most valuable and enduring asset, serving as the foundation for both digital strategy and transformation,” Edwards writes. “Yet maintaining a strong grip on rapidly spiraling amounts of data scattered across public and private clouds, as well as in on-premises environments, requires a new and innovative management approach.”
Dating back a decade and more, some organizations attempted to improve data quality with an on-premises master data platform, with mixed results. Complexity, high management overhead, and still-maturing technology impeded the results that customers were looking to achieve.
Today, our team at OSI Digital is seeing more organizations embrace cloud-based master data governance as an integral part of their data readiness and management journeys.
Building on Boomi Success With Master Data Hub
Many of those organizations are Boomi customers that started with core Boomi Integration, and then built on that success with Boomi Master Data Hub to improve data quality by validating, enriching, and synchronizing data across disparate systems.
With Boomi, customers are sidestepping the onerous development and maintenance overhead of previous on-premises master data systems. Because the Master Data Hub repository works seamlessly with Boomi Integration, data connections and flows are readily reusable.
Master Data Hub will generate trusted, accurate data from multiple applications and propagate that information to all relevant systems in an IT environment. It also provides a framework for data governance and stewardship among both business and IT stakeholders, helping ensure that the right data is accessible at the right time to the right systems and people.
In addition, Boomi’s robust capabilities for data privacy and security, such as AES 256-bit encryption, are shared across the complete Boomi AtomSphere Platform, providing assurances against a breach and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Mastering Customer Data for Accurate Billing
In one customer success story, OSI Digital worked with World Oil Corp., a large oil recycling company, to eliminate a painful and error-prone process of manually validating customer addresses across an Oracle NetSuite ERP application and a standalone billing engine.
Previously, World Oil staff spent up to four hours a day manually managing customer addresses for accurate invoicing. That chore was automated with Master Data Hub validating addresses in the ERP and billing systems, with exceptions highlighted and quarantined for human intervention.
Our OSI Digital team also used Master Data Hub to streamline daily reporting to customers, creating “golden records” across ERP, billing, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and numerous homegrown applications. Now customers have access to accurate daily updates on status and activity in their accounts.
Learn more about World Oil’s successes with Boomi and OSI Digital in this on-demand webinar.
Optimizing Customer Data After M&A
Another OSI Digital client, a large digital marketing firm, faced acute challenges after several acquisitions brought on many duplicate customers that already existed in their systems. To bill accurately, two staffers worked full time in spreadsheets to check for duplicates, and validate or correct disparate customer data in several applications.
Boomi Master Data Hub supplied an elegant solution that helped ensure that the right customers were billed for the right service, automating the order to cash lifecycle. The firm was able to repurpose the two full-time staffers to more productive work, and also improved the speed and quality of its month-end financial close.
In a related challenge, the acquisitions also increased the company’s product lineup to an unwieldy 500-plus products. Boomi Master Data Hub was instrumental as the company consolidated and rationalized the product lineup, and helped ensure appropriate and uniform naming conventions.
Other companies are using Master Data Hub to support employee onboarding and management. At a sustainable energy company, OSI Digital deployed Master Data Hub on an in-house server as additional protection for privacy of encrypted employee data across HR, payroll, and learning management systems.
Boomi Builds Out a Data Management Portfolio
One reason that OSI Digital is an avid Boomi partner is the continuous innovation from the Boomi team.
Master data governance is another example of how Boomi delivers rich capabilities for organizations to digitally transform into data-driven enterprises. In previous posts in a blog series from OSI Digital, my colleagues have also discussed:
- Building an Event-Driven Architecture for the Real-Time Enterprise
- Boomi-Powered BPA: A Framework for Business Process Automation
- APIs and Microservices: A Catalyst for the Data-Driven Enterprise
To learn more about master data governance and data readiness, and how OSI Digital and Boomi can help your organization, contact OSI Digital or Boomi experts.