Blog

Insights on master data management, migration strategies, and reference data governance.

87 articles

July 3, 20268 min read

Product classification master data: why your biggest spend category is Miscellaneous

A procurement lead pulls spend by category to prepare supplier negotiations, and the largest category in the company is Miscellaneous: 31% of indirect spend in a bucket that says nothing about who supplies it. No buyer chose that category. The item form defaulted to it, and four thousand items piled up over three years. Product classification is not one tree. It is several, each serving a different consumer, and here is how to govern them.

July 1, 20268 min read

Multilingual master data: the translation that stopped tracking the product

A furniture spec changes from solid oak to oak veneer, someone updates the English, and the German and French storefronts keep selling the old description for another six weeks. The translations were correct the day they were written. They just stopped tracking the thing they described. Multilingual master data is where a translated value quietly detaches from its source and nobody notices until a customer returns the wrong table. Here is how to model it so the languages stay in sync.

June 29, 20268 min read

Master data hierarchies: the rollup that counts the same revenue twice

Three regions add up to €112M against a company that booked €100M. Nobody invented €12M of revenue. A few national accounts sit under their geographic region and a separate National Accounts branch at the same time, so the rollup walks both paths and counts their sales twice. The records were all correct. The tree they hung on was not. Hierarchies are the part of master data everyone forgets is data, which is why they are governed least and break worst.

June 26, 20268 min read

Bill of materials and master data: which half of the BOM your MDM should actually own

A buyer tries to claim a volume discount on a stainless M6 bolt and finds three plants buying it under three different part numbers, each one short of the threshold the bolt clears with room to spare. Same bolt, three records, no discount. A bill of materials is two layers: the structure, which belongs in your ERP, and the items it references, which are master data. Here is which half your MDM should own, and what breaks when the part numbers underneath the BOM are never reconciled.

June 24, 20268 min read

Unit of measure master data: the code list that orders twelve times too much

A buyer reorders 480 units of a cleaning chemical and 11,520 turn up on the dock. Nobody typed the wrong number. The item was created with a default conversion factor of 1 that nobody changed, so the system read 480 each as 480 cases and multiplied by 24 on the way out. Unit of measure is two things wearing one name: a code list and a set of multipliers. Almost everyone governs the first and forgets the second.

June 19, 20268 min read

How to validate a master data migration before you trust the new system

The import ran without errors and the counts look about right, so someone wants to flip downstream systems over on Thursday. This is the most dangerous moment in any master data migration. A clean log tells you the rows that made it in did not break anything; it tells you nothing about the rows that never made it in. This reconciliation proves the new system matches the old one, and most teams skip it.

June 17, 20268 min read

Asset master data: the machine finance and maintenance both think they own

Finance points at the fixed-asset register. Maintenance points at the EAM system. Both are describing the same physical machines, the two lists barely overlap, and so the plant carries equipment on its books that was scrapped two years ago while a written-off pump runs three shifts a day. Asset master data falls in the seam between finance and operations, which is why neither governs it.

June 12, 20268 min read

Location master data: one warehouse, four system codes

A company with twelve physical sites somehow has sixteen plants in the ERP, nineteen warehouses in the WMS, and a mapping spreadsheet that one BI analyst maintains to hold it all together. Location master data is the smallest domain in the catalog and one of the most widely referenced, which is why nobody noticed it was never governed.

June 10, 20269 min read

Employee master data: the domain everyone assumes HR already handles

Every company has an HR system, so everyone assumes employee data is handled. Then a terminated employee keeps approving invoices for three weeks, a contractor shows up under three different IDs, and the cost center report disagrees with the org chart. Employee master data is its own domain, and the HRIS only governs a slice of it.