Master Data Management System

Investment in development of information systems ensuring formalization of operations is important for the enterprise to get new competitive advantages.

The institution of any ownership and activity uses various reference materials in everyday work. These reference materials include reference books, lists of employees, lists of contractors, nomenclature of goods and services and other similar information, national Russian classifiers and sectoral classifiers. Gradually, this multitude of reference books and classifiers in use form a normative and reference information (NRI) collection. Employees of various departments maintain and replenish this collection in medium-size and large enterprises. As a consequence, the same objects in different reference books are described and included in catalogues in different manners; the data duplicate and contradict. Hence, interplay of enterprise information systems leads to problems.

The Corporate support system for normative and reference information (NRI CSS) is a technological solution proposed by the IBS Integration Solutions Department. It ensures consolidation, centralized storage, processing, analysis and management of NRI by means of integration of the company information systems at the reference data level.

Integration of NRI enables increasing efficiency of all the company departments and achieving several objectives at once:

• Increase of work efficiency
• Assurance of information support of business processes
• Decrease of costs for analysis of the activities of the company or its departments
• Decrease of material expenses by increasing operation supervision efficiency, target process supervision efficiency, etc.

The companies that have the characteristics listed below, will receive maximum benefits from using NRI CSS:

1. The company is geographically distributed and/or is a network of individual companies or a holding company.
2. The company uses large amounts of wide nomenclature NRI in its work.
3. The company uses a large number of information systems simultaneously.
4. There is intensive exchange of business data between the operated information systems (or is planned ).
5. The company gathers (or plans gathering) business data to compile consolidated reports or to analyze current activities of the company as a whole or the company’s departments, business directions, etc.

Functional components of the system:

• Functions that ensure NRI CSS interplay with the integrated systems
• Functions that maintain the centralized reference information storage
• Reference information representation functions
• Functions that support consolidated reporting formation and analysis
• Functions that ensure system operation

Implementation of NRI CSS results in:

1. Direct financial benefits:

• Saving of funds spent on quality assurance (relevance, consistency, completeness) of reference information in all operated information systems within the traditional system framework (i.e. checking and assurance of quality at the moment when query for use of reference information appears in the specific system)
• Saving of the existing software license costs for reference data management (for example, SAP R/3)
• Decrease of costs for corporate NRI maintenance by arranging a single reference information management entry point for all systems of the company
• Decrease of costs for information data exchange between the information systems operated in the company and increase of data exchange efficiency

2. Indirect financial benefits:

• Prevention of company losses caused by using poor quality reference information (irrelevant, inconsistent, incomplete) in the course of carrying out of business functions
• Protection of investment into existing systems and decrease of costs for the integration into the company’s information environment
• Prevention of losses caused by consolidated reporting data errors. These errors can be the consequence of failures connected with processing of the primary business data collected (as a result of irrelevancy or inconsistency of the reference information used in describing of primary business data).

3. Benefits from arrangement of NRI use and maintenance processes:

• Increase of NRI relevance in all connected information systems
• Accessibility of relevant NRI for any company employee in real time without limitations related to territorial location and time separation
• Assurance of transparent management responsibility distributed between different reference materials

4. In addition to the above, the solution has the following technological features:

• Use of existing communication infrastructure and software of the company
• Guaranteed data exchange between the systems to be integrated and the NRI CSS
• Centralized system functioning management and monitoring
• Use of internet technologies, absence of modules that must be installed into the user's workstation
• Flexibility of configuration of reference tools, flexibility of configuration of connected systems interplay process, flexibility of NRI processing configuration.

The table below shows an optional collection of Microsoft software products necessary for implementation of NRI CSS:

*If arrangement of joint work with documents and establishment of the NRI CSS corporate portal is not necessary, this function will be implemented by using separately developed software modules.

** If integration with SAP R/3 is required.

Contacts

IBS Integration Solutions Department

Contact person: Evgeny Ponomarenko (Eponomarenko@ibs.ru)

Phone: +7 (095) 967-8080