Master Data Governance and Your Materials Cleanse

Sometimes, our materials data gets messy because the system that hosts it is tricky to navigate. When your EAM system, CMMS system, or other enterprise software is unwieldy, changing and improving the data within it can become a time consuming and tedious task. As we mentioned in our last blog, a great way to keep materials data clean (or to prevent it from getting dirty in the first place!) is to implement a master data governance solution. Rather than flip your system inside out and transform your data from top to bottom, this kind of solution helps you ensure that the data entered on a day-to-day basis is high quality and fit for purpose.

So what does master data governance mean?

Master data is the core data that is essential to how a business operates. Master data governance, then, is the management of this important information. An asset-intensive business may sometimes struggle with duplicated data entries, poor validation processes, inaccuracies due to human error, or complicated software solutions that make their EAM data difficult to customize and configure. All of these lead to poor master data governance, which continues the cycle of poor quality master data. As you may know from our blog series on materials cleansing, poor data quality can have a domino effect, leading to a host of other issues, such as unnecessary downtime, cost overruns, and inefficient or lost wrench time.

A master data governance solution is one that helps organizations resolve the issues outlined above by allowing workers to easily change or correct the way their data is input or managed. This can mean multiple different things, like having changes to data entries suggested to workers by a system that has learned from corporate standards or historical data,  or having a user-friendly and easily accessed spreadsheet outlining data quality issues, or even having pre-installed templates that simplify workflows and data models. In the context of a materials cleanse, pursuing strong master data can be the opportunity to cleanse large sets of data at once. The work of searching spare parts data, validating spare parts data, and requesting changes to spare parts data is taken on by a software that specializes in master data governance, making spare parts management that much easier for workers.

“Keep it simple, stupid.” – Kelly Johnson, American aeronautical and systems engineer

The whole purpose of good master data governance is to simplify the complex systems and data that play a vital role in asset-intensive businesses. Simplicity is key. If you’d like to learn more about how a master data governance solution can help keep your materials cleanse simple, check out one of our resources below, or book a demo with us to chat with an expert!