Product Master Data Management for Industrial Automation

The measurement and analytics business unit within a global leader in power and automation technology companies was struggling with inconsistent product master data across its product groups, ERPs, regions, and markets.

The inconsistent data made it hard for the company to determine which products customers were purchasing.

Consistent data was necessary for the business to achieve its goals of interchanging bills of material between factories, managing the product lifecycle better with lean supply chains, enabling guided selling based on industry application, and simplifying instrumentation configuration, selection, and sizing. The company also had multiple master data repositories across different parts of the organization and needed to resolve and agree on the appropriate data governance structure.

The company chose to partner with g2o because they knew our expertise in master data management and data governance could help bring the right solution for the challenges they faced.

g2o worked with the company on a systematic data-focused approach to create a canonical model for product master data, organizing attributes into hierarchies, by selection and sizing parameters, and mapping them to ISO forms for automated data intake. The team also established the lifecycle of product master data, with a well-defined RACI chart, and source system identification. They also recommended a corrective course of action based on findings of root causes and changes to the REST APIs for data access so that they can be used universally for product data interchange, regardless of instrument type.

The team collaborated with multiple product groups and master data owners at the group, business unit, and product group level, to determine the right split of roles and responsibilities at different levels of the product hierarchy. The result was a federated model where group standards applied to a portion of the hierarchy, while product group levels were managed by the individual design owners. This allowed the company flexibility, while also providing the data governance it needed.

The data-focused product concept map provided a canonical model for product data interchange, simplifying how product data could be organized. The simplified model also laid the foundation for a new master data exchange repository for critical, shared attributes between systems.

It further provided a mechanism to manage product lifecycle management, such as obsolescence and suppression. The model also allowed creating cross-domain relationships with industry application use cases.