Genentech Customer Master - An MDM/CDI Implementation

For an organization, the ability to consistently define who it considers to be a Customer is a challenging but important task, and the effort to be able to identify an individual customer across multiple departments, applications, and processes even more so. Genentech went live with its Customer Data Integration (CDI) solution as part of its information strategy through close collaboration between IT and the business.

Steve Thompson and Mehmet Orun provided the business and IT views of their CDI implementation project.

Mehmet stated that CDI was a relatively new packaged technology at the time of their implementation, and how Genentech choose it through a Proof of Concept demonstrating value and further clarifying capability and implementation timeline, to better manage customer expectations. He also encouraged others to always define the challenge and look out for new technology to see what may be automated or managed further.

Steve provided an overview of how Genentech's Customer Master evolved over multiple phases and how earlier value was provided to the business by providing ad-hoc matching services.

With gCM having its own data and functionality improvement roadmap, as well as a roadmap to further integrate it into the applications arcitecture, the team is looking towards other types of master data projects in a broader roadmap.

The key messages highlighted were:

• Master data needs to be managed seperately, if the data creation cannot be centralized
• Look at MDM for all data types and prioritize based on business need as well as who will sponsor the effort from a money and people perspective.
• While transactional applications have master data, and specialized management processes, their functional scope and flexibility tends to be limited, making ERP applications unsuitable for true MDM capability (ERP vendors' recent new MDM solutions further solidify this view)
• Technology evolution introduces new technology to addressing many of the MDM challenges. Always see what is out that was not before, conduct a PoC, and focus on the value proposition
• Descibe business value of MDM in broader context. How does it support CRM, business intelligence activities? Make a plan to make sure it gets leveraged
• Identify what else needs to change in the applications architecture to take better advantage of the integrated data sources. DW dimensions or application interfaces may need to change to provide access to richer, better completeness data.