Welcome to the March edition of "Best Practices in Master Data Management", published by Hub Solution Designs, Inc. We hope you’re enjoying the extra hour of sunlight every day!
In this issue, we’ve got:
- Hub Designs and Caliber Services Announce HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B
- Oracle-DNBi Connector Exports Information from Oracle AR to D&B’s DNBi Platform
- Seven Ways to Reduce IT Costs with MDM, by Ravi Shankar of Siperian
If you have any questions about MDM or data governance, please feel free to ask them via our web site, or call us at (781) 749-8910.
Best regards --- Dan Power
Announcing HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B
Hub Solution Designs and Caliber Services have teamed up to offer HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B, enabling access to global D&B data from the Oracle E-Business Suite. This removes the complexity from integrating D&B with Oracle and offers a cost-effective way to access D&B data in real-time from Oracle’s popular applications suite.
Dan Power, president of Hub Solution Designs, stated, “Accessing D&B information on over 140 million businesses globally allows organizations to increase the speed and accuracy of their decision making, while reducing their process costs and decreasing risk.”
With today’s fast-changing economic climate and the rapid pace of mergers & acquisitions, credit and marketing decisions have to be made quickly and accurately. Getting real-time information on prospects, customers and trading partners, in your backyard or around the world, is difficult. Integrating that data with Oracle applications can be challenging too.
Robin Walker, managing partner of Caliber Services, noted “Companies are looking for rapid time-to-value. HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B literally allows companies to be up and running, and pulling D&B information into their Oracle E-Business Suite environment, in a few minutes.”
About Hub Solution Designs, Inc.
Hub Solution Designs is a management & technology consulting firm which specializes in developing and executing high impact Master Data Management and Data Governance strategies. For more information, please visit www.hubdesigns.com/hubcaliber.html.
About Caliber Services, LLC
Caliber Services is a consulting company focused on Oracle Applications with a specialty in the Credit-to-Cash process, including expertise in Credit Management, Advanced Collections, and Promotions Management. For more details, please visit www.caliber-services.com/hubcaliber.
Oracle-DNBi Connector Exports Information from Oracle AR to D&B’s DNBi Platform
Real-time information, from your internal Oracle Receivables system and from external sources like D&B, is crucial to making good credit decisions in today’s fast-changing business environment.
Hub Solution Designs offers the Oracle-DNBi Connector, allowing you to export customer aging information to D&B’s DNBi risk management application.
Oracle E-Business Suite (Release 11i) is a popular Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application for corporate finance departments. Most IT groups don’t have the time or resources to create a custom interface between the customer aging information in Oracle Receivables and D&B’s DNBi risk management application. But without that, you aren’t getting the full value of your investment in DNBi.
Hub Solution Designs’ Oracle-DNBi Connector is a low-cost, pre-built solution. It consists of four parts:
- A SQL statement to create a CSV file from Oracle AR aging data
- A new Concurrent Request so Oracle can run this (typically on a daily basis)
- PGP encryption to ensure your data remains completely secure at all times
- Files are transmitted to D&B via secure FTP
The deliverables consist of a design document containing the required SQL statement and the steps to build the remaining components. Two days of consulting services are included, to install the Oracle-DNBi Connector in your environment, as well as end-to-end testing with you and your D&B account team. Hub Solution Designs is very familiar with Oracle and D&B, and can help with related areas as well.
The cost of the solution is much less expensive than creating a custom interface from scratch. And the Hub Solution Designs team stands behind every project. The solution provides for sophisticated and secure transmission of sensitive data to D&B through PGP encryption and secure FTP. This closes the loop so your DNBi application has the internal AR aging information it needs from Oracle.
Seven Ways to Reduce IT Costs with Master Data Management
IT managers are facing a dilemma given the current economic climate – despite budget cuts, companies don’t expect reductions in the service levels provided by IT to the business. Under such circumstances, how do you maintain or improve service levels, and continue to run the business efficiently? Smart IT decision-makers are seeking out technology investments that can help to accelerate cost reductions and at the same time streamline business processes.
Master Data Management (MDM) is exactly this kind of investment. MDM ensures that critical enterprise data is validated as correct, consistent and complete when it is circulated for consumption by internal or external business processes, applications or users. A recent Gartner report on 2009 Enterprise Software Spending mentions that “the business case for many application and infrastructure initiatives are now aligning to cost reduction and risk management,” and that MDM is key to transforming business processes to streamline them further in current market conditions.
But not all MDM technologies can provide these cost benefits. Only an integrated, model-driven, and flexible MDM platform with easy configurability can provide rapid time-to-value and lower total cost of ownership. Consider the following seven ways a flexible MDM platform can lower costs:
Seven Ways to Reduce IT Costs
1. Reduce interface costs
One way to reduce IT costs is to lower the number of point-to-point integrations across applications. Business processes such as Order-to-Cash that cut across several heterogeneous applications require complex point-to-point integration between the individual applications. MDM can simplify these integrations by centralizing common information (master data), and making this reliable information available at the different points within business processes. Reducing interface costs has been proven in repeated implementations. But, it’s important to select an MDM platform that supports a non-invasive approach to integration.
2. Reduce redundant third party data costs
Eliminating duplicate data acquisition streams from external providers can account for significant cost savings. Many companies integrate third party data from institutions such as Dun & Bradstreet, unaware that another division within the company already subscribes to them. With MDM, third party data is integrated directly into the MDM system, which means redundant data subscriptions are eliminated. But when selecting an MDM platform ensure that it provides out-of-box integration with the most common third-party data providers.
3. Reduce data cleanup costs
Most companies invest in data quality tools to clean up data within an application for a specific business purpose. Later, as data quality requirements grow for other business purposes, companies continue to cleanse the data within other respective business applications. This increases the costs for multiple uses. By integrating the data from disparate applications into a central MDM system, it becomes possible to cleanse all data across the enterprise in a single system helping save on additional license and support fees. However, it’s important that in order to realize these benefits the MDM platform is able to leverage your existing investment through reuse of the existing data quality tool.
4. Reduce outsourced cleansing costs
An MDM system can provide significant cost savings by eliminating expensive outsourced manual cleansing. Some companies outsource the de-duplication of their data to an outside data cleansing services provider. Over a period of time, associated costs can mount to millions of dollars. An MDM system eliminates the need for outsourced manual cleansing by automatically cleansing, enriching and de-duplicating data on an ongoing basis, and centrally storing it for future use.
5. Reduce license, support and hardware costs
By centralizing data for the enterprise, MDM makes it possible to reduce the amount of, or even eliminate, redundant data stores and systems. Consider this scenario: a multi-national organization held their employee records in 70 different HR application instances. With this scattershot approach, company HR executives had no way to tell the exact count of employees. By centralizing the employee information in an MDM system and retiring the redundant HR instances, this company can now
- Gain accurate employee counts
- Reduce license and support fees by retiring redundant instances
- Lower costs associated with the maintenance of expensive hardware to run those systems.
6. Reduce custom solution development and maintenance costs
By replacing old custom masters, such as a Customer Information File or Operational Data Stores, companies can save on costs spent developing and maintaining them. But, be sure that the MDM platform you choose can be easily configured, as opposed to requiring coding. With flexible configuration, you can rapidly take over the current master and also extend your MDM implementation to address future business needs in other parts of the organization.
7. Reduce the cost of information delivery
Compliance and management reporting are two of the major functions supported by IT. When auditors or management doubt the authenticity of the data in the reports, it will often result in calls to IT to help prove the veracity of the data. MDM can help eliminate this situation by a) managing a single version of the truth along with a history of all changes, and b) delivering this information to any reporting, business intelligence or data warehouse. Hence the MDM system helps reduce IT costs by delivering reliable information.
Investing in a Flexible MDM Platform is a Smarter Option
For the reasons stated above, investing in an MDM platform is a smarter way to cut IT costs now during an economic downturn, instead of simply maintaining the status quo and facing hard decisions brought about by budget cuts.
However, decision-makers should be aware that not all MDM systems provide lower total cost of ownership and rapid return-on-investment. MDM systems that offer a loosely integrated set of core capabilities, model only one data domain such as customer, offer only a simple architecture such as registry, and integrate with only operational or analytical systems can actually increase IT costs by requiring extensive coding and customization. Hence, it is important to select a configurable MDM platform that comes with an integrated set of core MDM capabilities out-of-the-box, is able to model any type of master data, and supports a flexible architecture for integration with both operational and analytical systems. Such a system can be quickly implemented yielding rapid return-on-investment, and will keep maintenance costs down, resulting in lower total cost of ownership—something we strive for given the current economic climate.
About the Author
Ravi Shankar is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Siperian, Inc., an innovative provider of the most flexible master data management platform. For more information, contact the author at rshankar@siperian.com or visit www.siperian.com.
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