MDM and Business Process Management

The convergence of BPM and MDM is nothing new Products like Cordys have featured MDM components for some time while BPM vendors such as Software AG (when they acquired software foundation's) and Tibco also include MDM functionality as parts of their BPM stack. " business processes can only be as good as the data on which they are based" according to Forrester analysts Rob Karel and Clay Richardson in September 2009 they noted that data and process are as inseparable as the brain and the heart. Karel and Richardson went on to emphasise that;

…process improvement initiatives face a vicious cycle of deterioration and decline if master data issues are not addressed from the outset. And MDM initiatives face an uphill battle and certain extinction if they're not connected to cross-cutting business processes that feed and consume master data from different upstream and downstream activities.

Richardson also noted in his review of Software AG's acquisition of Data Foundations "The only way master data can reduce risks, improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, increase revenue, or strategically differentiate an organization is by figuring out how to connect and synchronize that master data into the business processes…." Clay goes on to say …..With this acquisition, Software AG acknowledges that the customers of its integration and business-process-centric solutions have a strong dependency on high-quality data. This move reflects a trend that we have identified and coined as "process data management," which recognizes the clear need for business process management (BPM) and MDM strategies to be much more closely aligned for both to succeed …"

This observation is quite true, more recently two clients have posed the question of how to manage data across the enterprise when embarking upon a large scale BPM program. They have realised as Karel  did that "To Deliver Effective Process Data Management...  data and process governance efforts [will need]to be more aligned to deliver real business value from either."

The often discussed promise of adaptive processes or as Richardson remarked the ability to make "....processes much more dynamic as they're executing……. processes reacting to business events and able to adapt in flight." In order to make this happen clean accurate date is critical, other wise your processes are going to be adapting to unreliable or worse inaccurate data. The challenge according to Richardson is getting BPM and data teams to work together, research suggests that only 11% of master data management and business process management teams are co-located under the same organization or at least coordinate their activities.

Organisations like play core however have already begin to realise the benefits of aligning the two schools of thought. PlayCore is a leading playground equipment and backyard products company whose products are sold under the brand names GameTime, Play & Park Structures, Robertson Industries, Ultra Play, Everlast Climbing, and Swing-N-Slide.

Each of PlayCore's six business units has its own separate general ledger (GL) system, and PlayCore corporate has a seventh. Two of them use JD Edwards; three of them use Intuit QuickBooks, while the other two use Sage MAS 200 and MYOB.
PlayCore's challenges centered around:

• Consolidating overall performance results from the seven separate GL systems
• Manual, time-consuming effort to pull detailed information from the different GL systems into the BPM system
• Centralizing class, department, customer, product, account, and company master data.

MDM enables PlayCore to fully leverage their BPM system for efficient, timely analysis. It gives PlayCore the ability to produce quick, correct comparisons and reports on Class, Department, Customer, Product, Account, Company—without worrying about the underlying GL, but with all of the necessary ties to financial statements, enabling them to drill down where necessary.

 Source Profisee.com