Master Data Meets BigQuery: 3 Ways MDM Extension for Google BigQuery Delivers Value

This blog is co-authored by Subhajit Majumdar, Senior Manager, Product Management, Informatica.

Creating and maintaining a comprehensive 360-degree view of your enterprise data is fundamental to driving business growth. For example, a single source of truth for your customer data is critical to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive initiatives like enhanced customer loyalty, tailored recommendations and consistent omnichannel experiences.

Similarly, effectively managing supplier data can help identify and mitigate supply chain risks, enhance supplier collaboration and benchmark supplier performance against industry standards. In addition, effectively managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and rating data for various suppliers can help you achieve sustainability goals and reduce climate risk.

If your company has a range of product lines, managing data across the entire product portfolio is critical to delivering a great product experience for your customers. Being able to view your hierarchy level product data can improve business reporting and help your product research and development team launch new products and services more effectively.

Two critical elements go into maximizing your data potential. First, you need to create a single source of truth for enterprise data across multiple domains, such as customer, supplier, product, employee and many more

Second, you need the ability to integrate your domain-agnostic master data directly with your data warehouse and analytics tools, such as Google BigQuery. This is instrumental in accelerating the time to value for your business use cases. This will also enable real-time data access and insights, allowing you to respond faster to changes and opportunities. As BigQuery is optimized for large-scale, real-time analysis, you can quickly tap into high-quality, accurate data for analytics-driven decisions in real time.

Let’s look at how the master data management (MDM) extension for Google BigQuery empowers analytics and drives business value faster:

Effective supplier data management allows for better prioritization and tracking of suppliers based on their performance, helping you focus on improving or replacing low-performing suppliers. However, in an era where ESG factors play an increasingly pivotal role in shaping corporate landscapes, you may prioritize sustainable practices across their supply chains. And there are several reasons you may be focusing on managing ESG data, including supplier risk mitigation, legal compliance, market competitiveness, investor confidence and reputation management.

You need the ability to seamlessly manage vast amounts of supplier-related ESG data — including emissions data, climate risk factors, labor practices, sub-suppliers and overall ESG ratings — to ensure real-time visibility, compliance and actionable insights for decision-makers.

Here are the key steps to enable ESG compliance for better supplier management:

• Integrate supplier data with external ESG rating agencies data: Seamlessly integrate data from leading external ESG rating agencies to provide a comprehensive view of supplier sustainability performance. This enables you to incorporate third-party evaluations into your internal ESG assessments for more accurate and holistic compliance monitoring.

The Informatica data integration and ingestion service seamlessly integrates with external ESG rating agencies such as D&B, Morningstar, Sustainalytics, MSCI, Assent, EcoVadis and Moody’s. By leveraging this integration, you can automatically import third-party ESG ratings into your supplier data.

• Create a sustainability hub powered by cloud providers: Establish a centralized sustainability hub using cloud technologies where real-time ESG data from various suppliers and partners can be aggregated.

The MDM extension for Google BigQuery allows you to consume master data directly in Google BigQuery by using out-of-the-box connectors, pre-built data models and egress jobs to facilitate the development of a centralized sustainability hub. This hub enables scalable, flexible data storage and analytics for continuous sustainability monitoring and reporting.

• Enrich the sustainability hub with detailed product and supplier data: Enhance the sustainability hub by enriching it with more granular data about each product and supplier, including ESG scores, compliance records and impact metrics.

This hub consolidates enriched product hierarchies and classifications, mapped with supplier data and categorized by ESG ratings. Suppliers are grouped into tier one or tier two categories based on emissions data or collected activity data. With BigQuery’s scalable architecture, this enriched data helps provide real-time insights into supplier sustainability and ESG compliance, enabling continuous monitoring and improvement.

• Publish analytical dashboards with supplier ratings for ESG-compliant supply chain management: Create and publish advanced analytical dashboards that display supplier ratings and ESG compliance metrics. These dashboards give executives and stakeholders real-time insights into supply chain sustainability, allowing for data-driven decisions to improve compliance and performance.

A comprehensive and consistent view of customer data coupled with BigQuery’s scalable, fast query abilities delivers accurate and essential customer insights into buying patterns, personal preferences and much more. These insights into your customers’ behaviors are instrumental in designing personalized marketing campaigns and Fastrack customer acquisition and retention process. Whether you’re expanding into new markets, launching new products or restructuring operations, insights into this customer data can directly improve your topline.

Similarly, key customer loyalty and lifetime value information provides deeper insights into cross-sell and upsell opportunities. By understanding which campaigns or touchpoints are most successful, marketing and sales teams can optimize their strategies and adopt data-driven decisions in customer outreach to drive higher return on investment (ROI).

With up-to-date behavioral customer data available directly in BigQuery, you can quickly predict future customer behaviors that can help you proactively address churn. Predictive analytics can identify at-risk customers, allowing you to intervene with targeted retention strategies and personalized communication. This reduces churn rates and ensures sustained customer relationships.

In a customer-first environment, with consistent product information and data aligned with personal preferences across all customer touchpoints, enterprises can elevate their customer experience to a new level by providing a seamless shopping experience across all touchpoints, including in-store, website applications and marketplaces.

By providing real-time visibility into inventory levels, demand patterns and production cycles, organizations can manage their supply chains more efficiently and reduce overstock, avoid stockouts and optimize their inventory better

By analyzing product sales and their usage data, you can set optimal price points that maximize profitability while remaining competitive in the market. Product data can also reveal which features or variations of a product are most valued by customers, allowing for premium pricing strategies or bundling options that enhance revenue.

Finally, if your company has a multi-level hierarchy of product lines, managing data across your comprehensive product portfolio is critical to delivering a great product experience. With a set of reference data available directly on a platform like Google BigQuery, your business can easily implement relevant brand hierarchies to boost your sales and revenue. Effective maintenance of product hierarchy data will streamline your business reporting to decision-makers and help drive future growth.

While MDM and 360 applications provide a complete view of your enterprise data — including supplier networks, customers, products and more — the MDM extension for Google BigQuery can help facilitate the consumption of your mastered data directly in Google BigQuery, enabling near real-time insights for decision-makers.

By utilizing robust data governance, integration and mastering capability from Informatica, alongside Google BigQuery’s powerful data analytics capabilities, you can seamlessly aggregate, assess and monitor enterprise data and generate value at scale. Learn more in this datasheet on how to drive trusted analytics and grounded GenAI apps with the MDM extension for Google BigQuery.