Conquer Master Data Management with a Multidomain Extension Designed for Retail

In retail operations, everything is related. What you sell is determined by your products . Which goods are available depends on your supplier network. And who buys products is shaped by customer demand. No part of the retail environment exists in a silo.

Making decisions that drive profitability, customer loyalty, and supplier efficiency requires the right data. Retailers typically have huge volumes of product, customer, supplier and location data . But if your business is like most, you may find it nearly impossible to bring together all of that data into a single, holistic view.

That’s a painful challenge for many retailers I talk to. After all, they can clearly see the value of well-mastered data. 

If they could infuse customer data into every touchpoint, they could provide more informed, real-time service and make better recommendations. More accessible supplier and product data would help them refine their omnichannel sales strategies. And more visibility across these data domains would allow retailers to pinpoint their most valuable customer segments by product, reduce supply chain risk and enable sustainable sourcing practices.
 

A customized data model for retail sparks your MDM implementation
 

Solving this challenge just got a lot easier, thanks to a new offering announced by Informatica. 

The MDM 360 for Retail Industry Extension brings data together and uses a comprehensive data model developed expressly for the retail industry to shape it. This free solution also includes out-of-the-box relationships, hierarchies and packaged data sets . The extension uses AI-powered metadata intelligence and automation from CLAIRE and runs on the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud.

With this prebuilt, packaged accelerator, you can master multiple data domains as one – creating unparalleled visibility throughout the retail lifecycle, from order to post-purchase. Providing an all-in-one data management solution for retail, the extension includes custom app layouts, rules and dashboards that you can set up in minutes. The solution can increase deployment speed by up to 20X over traditional implementation methods. 
 

An all-in-one solution for retail brings data domains together
 

By providing the connective tissue between your data domains, the extension decodes the complex problem of understanding data relationships within your operations. It helps you create a complete view of customers, products and suppliers. And it delivers insights that help you run your retail business more efficiently, profitably and sustainably.

This solution includes everything you need to elevate your MDM practice and add new data management domains, including:

• A comprehensive, unified data model for customer, supplier, product and location domains that eliminates weeks of design effort (see the figure)
• Prebuilt multidomain relationships and hierarchies, including product and product category hierarchies like GPC
  
• Data standardization and validation features, including ready-to-run data quality rules for identifiers, addresses, and contacts
• More than 50 additional reference datasets and code values 
• Out-of-the-box, industry-specific match and merge models  that help you analyze and build model-specific match rules
• Source/target system integration that helps you get more value from your master data like Google BigQuery integration for analytics  
• Data enrichment, with a connector licensed and distributed by Dun and Bradstreet, which enriches supplier financials, risk, ownership, classification, and ESG ratings and emissions data
• An intuitive business user interface with custom layouts
• Sample analytics like ESG and supplier analytics to demonstrate how you can use the extension to gain new insights 
• Support for standards such as EDI X12/ and EDIFACT
• CLAIRE powered automation for data management tasks like match and merge
   

Optimize operations with a unified view of retail data
 

The MDM 360 for Retail Industry extension helps retailers tackle a variety of MDM use cases. 

For example, it can help call center agents improve service by increasing visibility into multiple data domains. Agents can access data about customers, products purchased, products returned, defective products, the suppliers who manufactured them, and the locations where products or materials were sourced. With this insight, your agents can work more effectively to address customer requests, become better brand ambassadors, reduce the number of product returns, and even generate additional sales. 

The extension also supports analytics initiatives by unifying data about customers, products, suppliers, and locations. Retailers can use analytics tools to query one holistic data source and yield insights about everything from top-selling products and your most profitable customers to suppliers’ product quality.

Using the extension can lay the foundation to start small with your MDM project and expand to additional domains over time. You could begin by using the extension to master your product data domain and then add data from your customer domain as your team’s expertise grows. 

The solution also helps retailers who need help using their MDM solutions and domain data to make their operations run better. The built-in content, best-practice support and functionality of the extension can cut down on scoping and design time and get up and running faster, with reduced risk.

In retail, as with much of the business world, everything is connected. The MDM 360 for Retail Industry Extension makes it easy to effortlessly manage your data with a comprehensive solution that ties everything together. 

To learn more about Informatica’s MDM 360 for Retail Industry extension, visit our Retail page.