Knowledge Base

Master Data Management (MDM) is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency, and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets.

Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise including customers, prospects, suppliers, sites, hierarchies, and chart of accounts.

Customer profitability is a managerial accounting method that allows businesses to determine the overall profit a customer generates. A profitable customer is someone who generates a revenue stream greater than the cost of their acquisition, selling, and serving.

In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis. It is considered a core component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are central repositories of integrated data from one or more different sources.

A data source is where your data originates from. A data source may be the initial location where data is born or where physical information is first digitized. However, even the most refined data may serve as a source, as long as another process accesses and utilizes it.

ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. It is a three-step data management process that extracts unstructured data from multiple sources, transforms it into a format satisfying the operational and analytical requirements of the business, then loads it to a target destination.

BI (Business Intelligence) is a set of processes, architectures, and technologies that convert raw data into meaningful information that drives profitable business actions. It is a suite of software and services used to transform data into actionable intelligence and knowledge.

Data classification is an essential part of any data governance plan, especially with large amounts of data within your organization. It provides a solid foundation for your data security strategy by helping you understand where you store sensitive and regulated data, both on-premises and in the cloud. In addition, data classification improves user productivity and decision-making and reduces storage and maintenance costs by eliminating unnecessary data.

A data mart is a simple form of data warehouse focused on a single subject or line of business. With a data mart, teams can access data and gain insights faster because they don’t have to spend time searching within a more complex data warehouse or manually aggregating data from different sources.

A data lake refers to a central storage repository used to store a vast amount of raw, granular data in its native format. It is a single store repository containing structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data.

Data mapping is the process of matching fields from one database to another. It facilitates data migration, data integration and other data management tasks. Before data can be analyzed to gain business insights, it must be homogenized in a way that makes it usable as uniform data.

A data platform is an on-prem or cloudbased technology that allows data to be collected, transformed, unified and delivered to users or applications, or used for other business intelligence purposes, such as customer profitability monitoring, machine learning forecasting & prediction or departmental BI dashboards.

A golden record is the ultimate goal in the data world. It is a fundamental term in master data management and is defined as a single source of truth – a data point that contains all the necessary information we need, for example about a customer, an employee or other data areas in our data catalog.