Master Data Management a Priority for Bioventus in 2019
Imagine having multiple records for one customer or a record for raw material that reads like a record for a finished product you sell to customers. How do you make sense of it all? Who owns the data and who stewards it for your company?
The integrity of core data required to conduct your business is critical and is known as master data management (MDM). The master data, at Bioventus includes the core business entities of customers, material, vendors, and finance objects (such as cost centers and profit centers), in good working order.
MDM improvement is on the 2019 Company Scorecard and to learn more about it, we sat down with Yasir Minhas, Master Data Manager for Bioventus.
“It’s really the backbone of the business,” said Yasir. “Master data management is ensuring you have good practices and processes in place so when the data is captured, it is of high quality and doesn’t cause issues with downstream systems and interfaces.”
Companies have different maturity levels of data: Beginning Data Creation – which is inconsistent and full of gaps; Department Level – whereby a department recognizes some gaps and takes a siloed approach to improve the data they touch and rely on; Enterprise Level – where an organization seeks to improve data across the entire enterprise; and finally a high level of integrity, with a focus on Continuous Improvement.
All of the master data at Bioventus is inputted into SAP by our colleagues in finance, customer service, operations and quality.
“This year we are working to improve our data enterprise wide in the US and I have been meeting with stakeholders in Durham and Memphis,” said Yasir. “I also plan to connect with someone in our international business and bring them into the project.”
We are in good hands as Yasir’s background in MDM stretches back nearly 15 years and includes a number of years working for IBM. Sitting within the Business Intelligence team, he is also helped by Jaqueline Knicos, a Business Analyst and Tina Love, a Project Manager from the IT team.
“We are rolling out new practices and processes for data management and doing it in incremental steps so we don’t disrupt the business,” he explained. “We are sharing our recommended approach to data governance as well as clarifying roles by identifying data owners, process owners and data stewards.”
Putting this structure in place means greater efficiencies to make changes as it is now clear who to speak with when updating data. In fact, the team has recommended using DocuSign to have a formal record of proposed changes including who is making/requesting the change and a review and sign off by the data owners.
“This was a small step in the process, but a big change for Bioventus,” said Yasir. “And so far everyone we have met with is happy to understand our approach and get clarity on what part of the process they own.”
Much of the work in 2019 will center on customer visibility and reporting. Over the years, SAP users at Bioventus have inadvertently created multiple records for customers which does not allow the company to accurately track its business.
“I feel confident we will improve customer records and reporting,” he said. “Also, we are on track to close gaps in our governance processes as well as our data quality.”
The biggest challenge will be name and address clean up within the live SAP system. The MDM team will need to remove the data, cleanse it, and then return it to SAP with minimal disruption. At present they are analyzing what impact this will have so their work doesn’t negatively impact the business.
Millstone, our third-party provider of inventory management, logistics and packaging, is another consideration. To be successful, any MDM changes made by Bioventus must meet the system requirements of Millstone.
“We also need to make changes to how we identify customers by type,” said Yasir. “We have 25 different customer groupings in SAP right now. We need to reduce that number and clean up the customer data here as well. That is another big change.”
In late January, Yasir was in Memphis to meet with stakeholders that use SAP to capture customer master information. While the primary focus there was on a customer master stewardship program, he also got a chance to meet with some members of the material master team.
“This group is not getting as much attention as customer master but they have data issues of their own and need help to clean up their data. So we met with them to inform them of our approach with customer master and offered similar approach to identify process and data owner roles and data management responsibilities and to provide guidance to start improving the quality of their data.” said Yasir. “We will also design a formal training program for members of that team.”
It is a tall order for the MDM team, but Yasir believes it is achievable. And after that…what comes next?
Well, once they have cleansed and quality checked the data throughout Bioventus they will endeavor to keep the company in a mode of continuous improvement, the highest level of MDM program maturity.
The MDM team will also be a big part of integrating any business acquisitions that Bioventus makes as the company continues to grow. These acquisitions always come along with their own data set of customers, vendors and materials.
“That kind of project is always a complete unknown as it relates to MDM, but it is a fun puzzle to solve,” said Yasir