Comments on: Retail and MDM

By: Andrew White

Andrew White — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:44:56 +0000

Hi John, thanks for the post. I wish retailers really “got MDM”. Certainly retailers have a great need; many have grown via acquisition and rarely spend the time or money rationalizing systems, processes, or data. The average tenure of the CIO in retail is a lot shorter than for their supplier/partners so the level of “planning” remains much more short tern, tactical, or granular.

I have seen some activity, perhaps most, on “in-bound” product and related data from suppliers; some on “out-bound” multi-channel integration, and much less “enterprise” oriented to connect the other two to the rest of the business. Also, too many business applications – and BI providers – maintain “master data” (or say they do) when in fact they don’t; they master application specific data that may or may not include a reference to master data. This clouds the issue for many immature MDM program managers.

Price is a nasty little problem. Price is not always ‘master data’ in that there are different ways in which price is defined and managed. For some firms there is a standard price which can be managed as if it were master data; for others it is a derived piece of data that does not exist until an order is placed; so the definition of the price can be treated as master data but the actual observation is not. This makes for a good dialog with the business. With agreement, progress can be made.

Retail and how it works (or doesn’t) with their suppliers is a real fertile ground for learning about why MDM is needed, and why it is so hard to achieve. There are tons of politics, culture, technology, and processes barriers.

I am seeing interest in retail again, post economic down turn, so hope springs eternal.

By: John G

John G — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:02:00 +0000

MDM should be natural to retail when it comes to pricing. E.g. how does Walmart get prices to the stores? Specifically retailers that have different prices depending on location/rent etc.

By: Boyd Dimmock

Boyd Dimmock — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:07:30 +0000

I share your interest in Retailer’s need for better data management and have seen some recent activity where a retailer is getting significant advantage from implementing a strategy around single view of data. The initiative requires moving data out of it’s silos where the same data exists in different forms. I think the key to success is having the IT leaders and the Business leaders develop a common vision for the project. Usually this involves recogniziing both the added business value as well as the cost savings of managing too many data repositories.

It also helps to find some of the leading industry vendors who do “get it” and are developing solutions that both consolidate departmental data, deduplicate the data, as well as aggregates and syndicates data with internal and external data sources. Then the data becomes truly valuable for actionable merchandising decisions.