In this guest blog post, Simon Tuson, Senior Product Specialist, Product Innovation at Stibo Systems, explores the advantages of master data management deployments on Microsoft Fabric and how Stibo Systems can help.

Data is crucial to business success because it provides the insights needed to make informed decisions, optimize operations, and drive growth. Often, businesses ignore the investment behind that data. Let me explain how to maximize the return on your investment in master data management (MDM) by using Microsoft Fabric to extract every ounce of value from it.

Master data management adds value across business functions

Master data management is a business process requiring capable implementation to help companies curate their most trusted data across domains such as product, customer, location, and supplier. This data is critical for business operations to work effectively. Master data is an essential centerpiece for analytics purposes – serving as the single source of truth, or golden layer, of said data domains that underpin business intelligence (BI) and reporting on supply chain, sales, returns, and more. (The idea of a golden layer comes from the medallion lakehouse architecture, where data is ingested at the bronze layer, undergoes validation at the silver layer, and enhances business at the gold layer.) High-quality data is also critical to train high-performing machine learning (ML) models for predictive and prescriptive purposes such as forecasts.

Being able to leverage master data in a company’s BI platform is therefore instrumental to drive critical insights on business performance, such as financial performance, environmental, social, and governance performance (ESG), and other critical success factors.

Master data management multiplies the analytic power of Microsoft Fabric

Managing enterprise data can involve thousands of attributes, hundreds of relationships, and millions of records spread across disparate, often siloed systems. The ability to acquire, manage, and share information across the enterprise, and with ecosystem partners and customers – while providing governance to maintain integrity – requires a more agile, strategic solution, ready to address complex challenges.

Microsoft Fabric is well placed to support the need for delivering insights into activities such as data acquisition and data preparation, artificial intelligence (AI) tools for data science, and, importantly in this context, business intelligence through Microsoft Power BI. The Fabric platform integrates data sources into a cohesive stack to enable enterprises to perform end-to-end analytics. However, without master data from a properly curated master data management platform, little value can be gained from the insights.

Master data management adds value as a data source to Fabric in that it provides a trustworthy source of data across one or more data domains. Furthermore, a mature master data management platform will allow you to create and share collections of data that are targeted to specific business groups and needs, allowing you to avoid the ambiguity of unnecessary data and instead package data ready for consumption by applications within Fabric.

Figure 1: Multidomain master data management (MDM) and other data sources feed into Microsoft Fabric, which makes the validated data available to multiple data consumer groups.

Enhance Microsoft Fabric with Stibo Systems’ MDM

Recognized by Forrester as a leader in the management of multidomain enterprise data, Stibo Systems is a driving force between forward-thinking companies seeking to unlock the strategic value of their master data. Stibo Systems’ software-as-a-service MDM platform, in combination with its cloud-native data-as-a-service (DaaS) technology, offers not only the native capabilities to curate and control a company’s master data across domains through carefully designed data governance processes and capabilities, but also through its native integration with Microsoft Fabric.

With Stibo Systems, businesses can deliver master data to Microsoft Fabric as silver layer validated data tailored to the needs of data consumers, hence bypassing the bronze layer raw data, by utilizing preconfigured notebooks performing GraphQL queries against curated master data served at scale by the DaaS platform. Stibo Systems’ MDM makes data stored in legacy systems accessible, while enabling compliance reporting, dynamic marketing, supply chain optimization, and more by using AI and ML.

Companies can also serve up master data in combination with other data sources such as transactional data to build the insights they need to run the business. As a nice add-in to the integration, Stibo Systems’ master data management platform offers the capability to integrate Microsoft Power BI dashboards back into its user experience, enabling data stewards to act on data based on the reports they get from the platform.

Stibo Systems offers an end-to-end solution encompassing governed multidomain master data management, DaaS, and integration with Microsoft Fabric for end-to-end analytics and BI to drive business insights. If you’re interested in making informed decisions and achieving your goals, you can purchase Stibo Systems Master Data Management directly from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. You can also learn more about the growing number of companies that have benefited from the dedication, professionalism, and impact of working with Stibo Systems.

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