System can import metadata rules from a Master Data Management system

Description

The capability to import metadata rules from a Master Data Management (MDM) system into a planning, consolidation, or financial reporting environment is essential in large enterprise environments. This functionality allows the CPM system to interpret, classify, and handle data accurately by following the metadata rules defined in the MDM system.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A large enterprise uses a CPM tool for strategic planning and performance management. This enterprise also uses an MDM system to define metadata rules for product IDs, regions, customer types, and other important data, ensuring consistency across various departments and software applications.

Solution: The CPM software can import these metadata rules from the MDM system. So, for instance, a product ID of 'P123' defined in the MDM as representing Smartphones' is immediately recognizable and labeled as the corresponding product category in the CPM system. This allows seamless analysis of the financial performance of specific product categories.

Considerations

If the system you are looking at has it's own MDM platform, all the better. These are incredibly valuable when blending data from many sources - consider sales data from an eCommerce platform, warehouse data, sourcing data, CRM data - each of which has different definitions for the same SKU. Unifying that under one reporting and hierarchical framework makes reporting outputs make more sense.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Integration Abilities: How does your system integrate with existing Master Data Management systems to import metadata rules and associated metadata?
• Maintaining Rule Integrity: How does your system ensure the integrity of the imported metadata rules, and how are discrepancies handled?
• Alternative Setup: What if we want to import our corporate parent's rules, but also want to diverge from that in some cases?