As the Master Data Management industry matures, the industry focus is not only on the development of software to collect product records but software to implement the data quality process solutions supporting data governance and provenance including record history, structure, completeness and accuracy to ensure our customers are able to make confident, informed and accurate business decisions based on data accuracy. The first step of implementing a data governance program is implementing a naming classification system.
I have had experience working with single business home-grown classification structures and third party developed structures for purchase, currently I have chosen an open and public classification structure provided by ECCMA (www.eccma.org). This is beneficial to the customers that I support ensuring that they will always have access to the classification structure sometime referred to as the schema used to classify their data.
Implementing a classification requires setting up Identification Guide (IG) to establish the template definition to technically describe the product or service with enough information to support engineering, maintenance or purchasing while recognizing the limitation of software short and long description required character lengths. The IG template supports and simplifies the required information request to the manufacturer and suppliers to verify all information by our analysts to standardize the description.
To create an IG, we search the ECCMA class list; fortunately many of the classes are established. As the IG is set up we will use the ECCMA established class name convention; this will ensure that every item will be setup with the same name and format, every ball bearing item submitted will be classified as a BEARING, BALL.
The next step is to set up the properties required to describe the BEARING, BALL and for each property designated the data type requirements such as numeric, text string or designated unit of measure. The property value requirements for a BEARING, BALL might include TYPE, BORE DIAMETER, OUTSIDE DIAMETER, WIDTH, DYNAMIC LOAD CAPACITY, STATIC LOAD CAPACITY, MATERIAL and so forth. Our analysts will verify the data to the original manufacturer sometimes using xml to exchange the product information referred to as “Cataloging at Source”, the information requests are standardized and remove much of the quality issues commonly found in a non-standardized data verification or description process.
The property value description build is controlled by the sequence number of each property Item data that will make it’s way into a length restricted description field we place the most important information in the begin of the auto generated description.
Setting up the Identification Guides requires upfront strategic planning and detailed work, as you can imagine that a classification schema can be up to 10,000 classes depending on the industry but it provides a multitude of benefits including standardized requirements, a road map for our analysts to facilitate the process, improved data management reporting / metrics and enhances language translation for the global organization.
Tags: BPO, Business Intelligence, data, Data Cleansing, dataquality, eOTD, linkedin, masterdata, mdm, Software as a Service, spare parts