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Hint: It's Not Just for Warehouses Not every business has a warehouse or wants one. But--SURPRISE--Material Masters are just as essential to those who don't have warehouses as to those who do. And, in some basic ways . . . maybe even more so.Consider, for example, an office manager responsible for providing any number of things to facilitate day-to-day operations for a major corporate player. When an office supply is needed, there’s no company warehouse at hand to dial up on the telephone and requisition stock, just the designated and centrally located storeroom for all things office-related.It’s part of the [...]

Are we suggesting that applying best practices to supply chain optimization isn’t enough to guarantee data quality? Well. . .yes. (Sorry about that.) Without data metrics in play to quantify performance, your company's supply chain may not be quite as optimized as you’d like to believe. With more than thirty years of combined experience, our QuadraDot professionals know well the Material Mastering process and what it takes for supply chain optimization.Big Data is the term used by companies to describe the large volume of data--structured and unstructured--that daily engulfs a business in ever-increasing volumes. In today’s fluid marketplace, a company is only as [...]

It might sound like the title to a bad B movie, but the flap of a virtual butterfly’s wings in Master Data Management could result, for example, in something of a tornado in a company’s warehouse inventory. Experiencing what is popularly called the butterfly effect, some hapless companies would be forced to agree—a relatively small event in the scope of things led to a proper kerfuffle on down the line because bad data wasn’t properly identified, evaluated and dealt with conclusively.According to the online dictionary Wikipedia, chaos theory demonstrates that one tiny change in a nonlinear system can result in [...]

Should your company’s Material Masters seem inadequate, or just plain frustrating, perhaps your mastering process needs a little retooling. It’s easy to drift into a place of complacency when there are so many other company priorities clamoring for management’s attention. But Material Masters are pivotal, performing mightily at the hub of a company’s day-to-day business. So, make no mistake about it, if Material Masters aren’t given due diligence, those relatively insignificant issues might soon blossom into company-wide issues of near epic proportions.Consider that old-time company managers would’ve loved to have had the ease and control of managing data like company [...]

THERE WILL BE NO HINT OF MUTINY ON THE ERP BOUNTY…Frequently companies invest in a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with high hopes only to find out later that they’re still plagued by problems they thought would be a thing of the past: There are growing issues with the quality of the data; employees are getting frustrated with the software; now the new system is showing signs of the same challenges prevalent in the old system. Not all the inconsistencies in the old system have magically disappeared. Company stakeholders fear that they’ve now invested a lot of time and [...]

Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, first published his book Systema Naturae in 1735 in which he described his classification of the biological kingdom. For his renowned efforts, Linnaeus became known as the father of modern taxonomy, classifying living things into smaller and smaller sub-categories to give organisms a specific name as well as a group in which to belong.Methods employed by Biology students to remember the exact order in which this would occur, (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum/Sub-Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) were mnemonic devices—purely nonsense sentences that kept the precise order of the naming system memorable. The online dictionary Wikipedia [...]

In the burgeoning world of Big Data, Master Data Management and Master Data Governance are two areas of critical concern to businesses. Big Data is the term used to describe the large volume of data—both in structured and unstructured format—that daily engulfs a business. Unquestionably, those businesses that achieve a high degree of accuracy in master data are far ahead of the game in providing stability and accuracy for both their internal and external customers. But, what’s the difference between the two practices, which are sometimes used (perhaps erroneously) rather interchangeably? According to the online dictionary Wikipedia, “In business, Master [...]