An Introduction to the Master Data Management Reference Architecture

In many relevant business processes, entities like customers, products, accounts, contracts and locations play a central role. These entities are known as master data and many companies suffer today from low-quality master data scattered across the enterprise in various application silos. Improving master data quality and managing it more efficiently to optimize business processes is known as Master Data Management (MDM). An example would be the optimization of the New Product Introduction (NPI) business process by applying MDM for the product master data domain. A great deal of material is available that describes what MDM is and why it is useful. Therefore the paper shifts the attention to something which is of particular relevance for IT architects designing a MDM solution: The MDM Reference Architecture.