Your Challenge in Maintaining and Processing Transactional Data
Many organizations have challenges around managing significant volumes of transactional data. The transactional data often is core to the business to support billing/invoicing, sales, customer service and operations. Manipulation of the transactional data is often necessary to make it useful. Applying business process automation to this data often requires the development of custom applications to enforce and apply complex business rules. The very large volume that characterizes most transactional systems presents increased demands on infrastructure and application resources.
An Example in the Telecom Industry
As an example, companies in the telecommunications industry must manage significant volumes of transactional data: calls, texts, web/network usage. These organizations must ensure the accuracy of customer billing. A specific challenge is to ensure that each transaction is billed exactly once. The requirement to eliminate duplicate records often pushes organizations to build and maintain custom applications, incurring significant cost. For many telecoms, the validation process of the transactional data is a lengthy process, delaying billing and other dependent business processes by several days.
Apply Lessons from MDM to your Transactional Data Challenges
In Master Data Management (MDM), the elimination of duplicate records is a significant focus. While we don’t recommend mixing your transactional data into your MDM repository [link to blog article: Your custom MDM solution – Don’t make these mistakes (Part 1) ], we do recommend using MDM strategies and tools to clean up your transactional data. An MDM tool that we often work with is the Master Data Maestro Suite from Profisee. The Master Server within this Suite includes a feature called Matching Strategy. This feature is flexible, enabling you to configure specific and custom matching strategies for your organization, significantly reducing the effort to identify duplicate records within your transactional data. As with all MDM tools, the process is designed to create master records, and it can create a master record for each of your transactions. Your organization would then have a master catalog of de-duplicated transactional data to serve as the source of analysis for all areas of your organization.
Benefits of using MDM Tools for Transactional Data
By implementing packaged software to de-duplicate and process your transactional data, your organization can achieve improved transactional data quality with less cost of implementation and maintenance. The improved data quality will translate to improvements and greater efficiency in many areas of your organization that rely on this data: billing, customer service, operations, sales.