Master Data represents high value information regarding core entities used repeatedly by many business processes across enterprise. It provides insight into customer, products/services the organization offer, contracts one have with customer, suppliers and other business critical. But majority of times approaches of managing the master data seems to have given afterthought because business application is designed to manage the data for handle their own business concerns alone. This leads to issues where data entities like Customer managed by multiple application and each one managing subset of customer data. This in turn means that incomplete views of master data and also leads to complex integration infrastructure across multiple applications.
One of common use case is credit card cancellation. When customer cancels the credit card, call center personnel may be feeding data to one system and that data is not reflecting in other systems like billing application, this may lead to system sending monthly statement to customer and worst case may be charging the customer with annual charges. This will lead to unhappy customer who may never do business again with that credit card company and also leads to litigation.
The master data management solution tries to externalize master data entities from multiple applications to centralized repository and it becomes authoritative source of information. It will also provide the ability to build data services which can be exposed to other applications. It will also provides the ability to evolve master data to meet the ever changing business needs
