All too often, vital data is managed separately through compartmentalized silos and incompatible processes.
At its highest level, Master Data Management (MDM) is a discipline that addresses the companywide challenge of efficiently managing and integrating a wide array of critical components and entities: customer and service information, accounts, operational data, regulatory compliance standards, vendor and partner data, materials, accounts, products and relationships and hierarchies.
A disclaimer: we are not all things to all people. That’s never been our goal or purpose. Agility isn’t a total solution for every aspect of Master Data Management, but we do believe we provide the very best solution for one rapidly developing and increasingly critical area of MDM.
Our knowledge and our software’s functionality is uniquely deep and broad when it comes to providing a fully integrated solution for managing all aspects, down to the granular level, of product information, which is a key (and sometimes overlooked) element of the overall MDM discipline.
Our specialty, which we’ve called Product Management for Commerce, is actually a blend of MDM of Product Data functionality with the most advanced and simple-to-use tools for product enrichment, analytics and multichannel syndication. Those are functions, frankly, that no other branch of MDM has made a focal point or even a priority. But it’s emerged as an area of critical concern for companies selling every kind of product and one we ourselves have worked hard to define and progress. We’ve spent many hundreds of people-years refining our software and services around this conviction about its extreme importance.
Though we’re firmly committed to the premise that optimizing product information is a key deliverable, we’re also fully dedicated to that high-level ideal of MDM that we talked about at the top of this page. Agility isn’t only about product data per se. It’s also about linking it up, aligning its processes and harnessing its value in concert with all other master data, for a unified and holistic enterprise. Hence, our software was designed from its inception to manage multiple master data domains, including things, places, vendors, reference data and relationships and hierarchies. And it supports multiple MDM implementation styles, including co-existence, centralized, and consolidation.
MDM Domains
Agility has been designed and developed from the ground up to manage multiple domains.
The domains we’ve implemented with our customers (who use Agility to maximize the value of all of their data, the contributions of their entire team, and every sale through every channel) include:
- Party: Users, vendors and suppliers, roles
- Things: Products, accessories, parts, holidays, items for hire, tools, warranties, books, pharmaceuticals, credit terms
- Places: Holiday resorts, airports, warehouse locations, supplier locations.
- Reference Data: Choice lists, keywords, special characters. Manage lists of data in separate structures; e.g., defining “Markets”
- Hierarchies and Relationships: Everything in Agility is managed in hierarchies, with the added dimension of connecting entities via product relations.
MDM Implementation Styles
From day one of implementation, Agility has all of your styles covered.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to MDM implementation styles for product data.
If one style fits now, you’ll surely outgrow it as processes and systems evolve over time. The beauty of Agility is the flexibility it provides to adapt and accommodate growth and evolution. Our team of specialists have a deep understanding of each implementation style and can provide detailed blueprints for seamlessly integrating Agility into your MDM strategy.
Most of our customers adopt the Coexistence style, with partial Consolidation, for implementing MDM of Product Data, and in most cases that’s the simplest and quickest initial approach. Increasingly, however, we’re encouraging our customers to consider blending Coexistence, Consolidation and Registry styles. Our Agility Content Gateway facilitates access to the attribute-level data – housed in multiple systems and places – that the Registry style lets you view and manage through Agility.
Many of our customers hold vast quantities of product attributes in multiple systems. With this blended approach to MDM, they’re able to integrate, view and manage it all through Agility. Our Governance and Data Integration modules streamline their data model management and workflow setup; establish business rules validation definitions that can be shared between systems; ensure secure and accurate data stewarding and reporting across the enterprise, and define customized views and dashboards for business and power users to consolidate and digest all key data in order to convert it into shrewd strategy.