How MDM and 360-Degree View Solutions Fuel Data-Driven Digital Transformation in Industrial Manufacturing
White Paper
About Informatica
Digital transformation changes expectations: better service, faster delivery, with less cost. Businesses must transform to stay relevant and data holds the answers. As the world’s leader in Enterprise Cloud Data Management, we’re prepared to help you intelligently lead—in any sector, category or niche. Informatica provides you with the foresight to become more agile, realize new growth opportunities or create new inventions. With 100% focus on everything data, we offer the versatility needed to succeed. We invite you to explore all that Informatica has to offer—and unleash the power of data to drive your next intelligent disruption.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary .......................................................................................... 4
Overcome Data-Driven Challenges in Industrial Manufacturing .............. 5
Realize an End-to-end Information Value Chain with MDM 360 Applications ..................................................................................... 5
Product Information Management Based on a Product 360 View ............. 6Supplier Relationship Management Based on a Supplier 360 View ........... 7 Reduce Costs and Increase Operational Efficiencies .................................... 8 Shorten Time to Market and Increase Agility .................................................. 10Ensure Global Consistency While Respecting Local Requirements ........... 12 Deliver Integrated and Engaging Omnichannel Experience .......................... 13Reduce Supply Chain Risk and Support Compliance .................................... 14
Use Cases and Best Practices in Industrial Manufacturing ...................... 16
1. Manufacturer of Security Technology Realizes Product Data Quality and Efficiency .................................................................................................... 16
2. Industry-Leading Aerospace Manufacturer and Distributor StreamlinesProduct Life cycle ............................................................................................. 16
3. Automotive Manufacturer Improves Customer Engagement and Marketing Efficiency ................................................................................. 17
4. Global Power Industry Manufacturer Modernizes Data Syndication toCustomers and Distributors ........................................................................... 17
5. Supplier Information Management at Manufacturer of Paints and Coatings .................................................................................... 18
The Next Wave of Industrial Manufacturing Leaders ................................ 20
Partner Acknowledgment ....................................................................................... 20
Sources ................................................................................................................ 20
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Executive SummaryThe combination of so-called Industry 4.0 trends (including automation and data exchange in
manufacturing technologies including cyber-physical systems) coupled with the rapid evolution
of the Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are quickly disrupting existing business
practices for industrial manufacturers. These companies benefit from leveraging data-driven
digital transformation to ensure that they can leverage these trends to create opportunities
for—rather than threats to–their business. Leading organizations are increasingly reconfiguring
themselves from legacy producers of equipment and consumer products into value-added
service providers. Some have even launched businesses monetizing their production, sales,
and customer usage data as licensable intellectual property to other businesses.
Making transformative business decisions and accelerating digital transformation requires
that the next generation of industrial manufacturing leaders have quick, easy access to trusted,
relevant data. This requirement applies to new data sources and data types emerging from the
latest disruptive technologies and influences, as well as traditional data from the ERP landscape.
Crucially, master data must be of high quality to provide the correct context when combining
data from multiple sources to support new business processes.
In many cases, however, the business must deal with raw materials, works-in-progress, and
finished goods for production and aftersales, as well as supplier data that is spread across
different siloed systems, applications, business units, and regions. These systems occupy a
specific set of processes in the manufacturing and distribution value chain, from procurement
and asset tracking to manufacturing execution and accounting. This can make it difficult to have
a trusted, 360-degree view of their own data.
This also often leads to lost sales, operational waste, productivity loss, bad customer
experiences, and compliance issues. Poor data quality and availability hinder a company’s
agility and threaten its ability to implement the new business processes required to keep
pace with change.
Industrial manufacturers seeking to systematically and repeatedly unleash the power of their
product, raw material, and supplier data needed to create a flexible ecosystem in which everyone
along the supply chain has access to relevant information to work together collaboratively
toward eradicating waste across the value chain.
A modular end-to-end master data management (MDM) solution and a common data platform
for product information management (PIM) can enable this kind of full visibility throughout the
end-to-end information value chain. Such solutions can also include functionality to improve and
manage data quality. Following a unified approach towards excellence-in-data-management that
supports process optimization initiatives has a direct impact on the bottom and top line.
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Overcome Data-Driven Challenges in Industrial ManufacturingManufacturing today is in the midst of a fundamental shift, in many ways as dramatic as the
first industrial revolution, creating enormous opportunities for nimble manufacturers who
embrace this opportunity. Starting in the 1980s, Industry 3.0—the third industrial revolution–was
driven by the advent of automation and computer technologies focused on individual machines
and processes.
The current manufacturing paradigm, Industry 4.0, focuses on the end-to-end digitization of
physical assets (or information about those assets) and the integration of that data into digital
ecosystems with value chain partners. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a fundamental
element of Industry 4.0. To get value from the IoT, organizations must efficiently process rising
volumes of data from a wide variety of equipment, sensors, and locations.
The global market and political mood add uncertainties for manufacturers. Brexit, tariff wars,
and the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are just three
geopolitical events that may disrupt established supply chains that cross borders multiple
times. Industrial manufacturers are also often lured to overseas production locations by labor
arbitrage. Manufacturers need to evaluate carefully how to respond to such a tempting premise
by analyzing their local yields when it comes to input cost, such as commodity, energy and labor
availability, cost, and quality. Some of these factors of production are more easily understood
and replaced than others, but the immediate and long-term impacts need to be carefully weighed,
as fluctuations in factors such as inventory, hiring, training costs, and local labor and emissions
regulations have a direct impact on financials.
Manufacturers often react to uncertainty by mitigating risks in their operations by outsourcing
large pieces of their supply chain, such as material cataloging, order processing, shipping, and
packaging. The semiconductor and consumer electronics sectors are at the forefront of this
change by focusing on design and marketing. Losing direct control over these outsourced
processes requires organizations to respond by introducing digital means to recapture visibility
and operational access.
In this white paper, we’ll first describe two MDM-fueled applications that help solve these overall
data challenges. Then we’ll walk through specific challenges and how these applications can help
manufacturers succeed.
Realize an End-to-End Information Value Chain with MDM 360 Applications Leading industrial manufacturers realize that the foundation of digital transformation is trusted,
governed, and relevant data to fuel their next-generation intelligent enterprise. In other words,
data is the digital core of efficient production and smarter products.
“Manufacturers investing in digital transformation will be able to maximize the outcome; the rest are held back by outdated business models and technology.”1
1 IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Manufacturing 2017 Predictions
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Manufacturers rely on MDM to ensure that trusted data fuels their process innovation and help
them overcome problems stemming from fragmented and inconsistent data. Informatica® offers
master-data-fueled business applications designed to meet these needs and to support and align
with distinct business processes and workflows.
These master-data-fueled solutions, Informatica MDM – Product 360 (Product 360) and
Informatica MDM – Supplier 360 (Supplier 360), support multiple departments, teams, and
suppliers of an organization with the ability to jointly manage their supplier and product data,
as well as omnichannel tasks rooted in a unified common platform. Informatica’s MDM 360
applications are built on top of a complete, modular, and integrated platform, the Informatica
Intelligent Data Platform™, which helps companies unleash the power and value of all data across
the hybrid enterprise, including industry-leading proactive data quality, holistic data governance,
and end-to-end data integration solutions, among other capabilities.
The following section provides a brief overview of Product 360 and Supplier 360, describing how
manufacturers can connect their supply chain and go-to-market strategies and improve their end-
to-end information value chain.
Product Information Management Based on a Product 360 View
Product 360 is Informatica’s master-data-fueled PIM solution. It helps industrial manufacturers
increase productivity, streamline compliance, and improve the B2B or B2C customer experience
through unified, up-to-date, and complete information across all sales channels.
With Product 360, industrial manufacturers manage and collaborate more effectively on rich
product content with an efficient end-to-end, transparent process along the product information
supply chain. By delivering clean, consistent, and trusted product data, Product 360 empowers a
company’s data-driven digital transformation, improving agility and time to market.
Product 360 Offers the Only Modular End-to-End MDM Solution
EcommerceManager
Check-InTeam
ProductManager
CampaignManager
Buyer
CategoryManager
ImproveOmnichannel
DataOnboarding
CustomerCentricity
Photographer
Data Steward
Suppliers Store
Data PoolsData Pools
BusinessPartners Digital
SourceSystems Social
Standardize
Exchange
Enrich
Collaborate
Manage
Approve
PublishAcquire
Customer 360Supplier 360
Product 360
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Supplier Relationship Management Based on a Supplier 360 View
For manufacturers that have gone through acquisitions or that work across multiple
geographies, supplier information is often managed in multiple siloed systems and applications
across regions and business units. Adding, changing, or correcting the information in one system
doesn’t automatically update it in the others. Additionally, without automated and standardized
workflows for supplier onboarding and collaboration, time to market is slowed; supplier
relationship teams wind up spending too much time inefficiently managing their suppliers’
life cycles, performance, and information. As a result, the information is often inaccurate,
inconsistent, incomplete, and fragmented, creating a huge data-management overhead.
Ineffective supplier relationship and life cycle data management hinders the efforts
of a manufacturer’s supply chain operation to accelerate the digital transformation of their
value chain.
Supplier 360 unleashes the power of a manufacturer’s supplier data by providing an intelligent,
end-to-end view of all business-critical supplier information across the enterprise. The application
enables a manufacturer’s supply chain organization to transform their supplier relationship
management by transforming inaccurate or disconnected supplier information into trusted,
governed, and relevant data to fuel business and analytical applications. It provides a flexible
ecosystem in which everyone can access relevant information and manage vendors, their
relationships, and the products and services they supply. Streamlining supplier relationship and
life cycle management, Supplier 360 accelerates the data-driven digital transformation of the full
information value chain. Sourcing, procurement, finance, and supply chain executives leverage
Supplier 360 to manage supplier life cycles, monitor supplier risk, and collaborate with vendors.
Market’s Only Modular End-to-End MDM Solution
Validate & EnrichSupplier Information
Onboard New Suppliers
Approve
Monitor SupplierCompliance
Monitor Supplier Risk
Manage SupplierRelationships
Fuel Other SystemsWith Trusted andGoverned SupplierInformation
Registration
Update CompanyInformationSuppliers
Analyze SupplierPerformance
Upload and UpdateProduct Catalogs
ERP
PIM
Bidding
Quotation
Accounts Payable
Invoicing
Product 360
Supplier 360
Buyer Org Users
Supplier 360Self Service
Portal
Supplier 360 is seamlessly embedded with Informatica’s Product 360 solution for
product catalog upload and product information management in a single application for
all supplier interactions.
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Manage Complexityof Product Data
SupplierSelf Service
Onboard NewSuppliers
Merchandising, Product Management,
Procurement, Marketing...
UploadProduct Catalogs
Self-Registration
ProvideSupplier Data
Sourcing, Procurement,Finance, Supply Chain, Supplier Management
Validate and EnrichSupplier Information
Manage DigitalAssets
Monitor Supplier Riskand Compliance
EnrichProduct Data
Analyze SupplierPerformance
Drive OmnichannelCommerce
Manage SupplierRelationships
Manage ProductTaxonomy
Fuel OtherApplications
Supplier 360 is available on-premises or as a cloud service and can be hosted on cloud platforms
such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Reduce Costs and Increase Operational Efficiencies
Cost reduction is among the top priorities in industrial manufacturing. Digitization plays a huge
role in achieving this objective. In fact, by 2020, industrial manufacturing companies expect
cost reductions of 3.6 percent ($52 billion) from digitization, according to a study from PwC.2
Industrial manufacturing companies often depend on multiple siloed systems and applications.
Product life cycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing
execution system (MES), and supply chain management (SCM) systems are standard features
in their complex architectures. Each of them stores and manages information about their
raw materials, products, and suppliers to support specific business processes. The number
of systems used often crosses a critical threshold after an organization experiences one or
more acquisitions.
Traditional Manufacturing Data Landscape
2 http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/industrial-manufacturing/publications/assets/pwc-building-digital-enterprise.pdf
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As a result, it is impossible to access one trusted view of all entities (i.e., suppliers, products,
and services) and relationships among entities. Without this consolidated view, there is no
consistency in information supporting business processes, making it impossible for these
businesses to make well-founded decisions.
Increased product complexity combined with multiple, redundant, and manual processes to
manage, update, and share product information also creates unnecessary work for overloaded
organizations. Manually searching for information, or classifying and capturing data, can be error
prone and time-consuming. Ultimately, this leads not only to poor product and supplier data
quality, but also to increased inefficiencies and costs.
How MDM Applications Can Help
To master the increasing complexity of product data within the information value chain—and
to reduce the related costs–business users, like product and catalog managers, need one
common platform. Product 360 and Supplier 360 are built on a common platform, the Informatica
Intelligent Data Platform, which enables effective collaboration on product content and supplier
data. It substantially reduces duplicate tasks, allowing employees to focus their talents on
higher value-added tasks, such as the creation and distribution of richer product information,
digital media assets, descriptions, and classifications. Increasing operational efficiencies when
managing and collaborating on business-critical product or supplier data ultimately results in
multiple opportunities to achieve significant cost reductions.
Customers using Product 360 report increased efficiency and reduced costs, as demonstrated
by these results:
Streamlining Digital Processes Cost savings by aerospace customer using MDM – Product 360 with Supplier 360
Customer needed to onboard 10 million parts to increase e-commerce sales
and streamline supplier onboarding
Business Need Without Informatica With Informatica
Reduce time for loading partsImpractical task that would require 34 years to load all 10 million parts
• Can be done in a practical timeframe (6 months), a reduction of more than 98%
• Data is more accurate, increasing e-commerce volume across all channels
Reduce costs for loading parts $2,000 per part Expected reduction in costs: approx. 90%
Streamline supplier onboarding
Customer has had to turn away suppliers due to capacity constraints, resulting in estimated lost revenues in excess of $90 million
• Streamlined supplier onboarding including supplier self-service capabilities
• Fewer customer resources spent on supplier onboarding opportunity to increase revenue by at least $90 million
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Shorten Time to Market and Increase Agility
Manufacturers must deal with demand volatility, quickly adapt to changing market
requirements, and accelerate time to market to meet customer demands for new and updated
products. This supply chain flexibility must be coupled with business process flexibility as their
customers increasingly require new collaboration and procurement models to support their own
digital transformations.
An agile business can better handle the uncertainty of how customers will behave and how
markets will react. Fast time to market is a key requirement to remain competitive, especially
with fickle consumer demand, complex global supply chains, increased competition, and product
commoditization. Without quick access to consistent, trusted, relevant, and rich product and
supplier data, the supply chain slows down for manufacturers, costly inventory accumulates at
the wrong buffer points, and orders go unfilled.
Speed and process automation are also important in procurement, supplier qualification, pricing
negotiations, and onboarding workflows. Fast and easy access to supplier spend and supplier
performance metrics helps manufacturers make the right decisions, respond quickly, and
detect anomalies.
How to Speed up Time to Market and Increase Agility
A single product mastering solution provides the foundation for more agile digital business
models. Informatica’s MDM 360 apps are proven to streamline collaboration and automate
workflows, ensuring that everybody within the value chain has access to relevant product and
supplier information. This increases efficiency and process speed.
• Improved Collaboration With Role-Based User Interfaces
With intuitive task- and role-based user interfaces and dashboards that are designed for the
business, industrial manufacturers can streamline collaboration, workflows, and processes–
both internally and externally–to create and enrich great product content. Product 360 ensures
that the relevant information is shared with the right employees, channels, and departments.
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Business users who are involved (e.g., product editors, data stewards, product managers,
e-commerce managers, and product hierarchy managers) can focus on what matters most for
them and their role in the process. Additionally, a simple, fast, and powerful web-based search
lets users easily find all product information.
• Digital Asset Management to Manage Complex Data More Efficiently
Large collections of media assets are managed centrally through a fully embedded digital asset
management (DAM) or accessed through connectivity to external DAM solutions. Product 360
enables you to easily and efficiently handle complex product data, such as images, graphics,
documents, audio files, or videos, in the format provided by suppliers. This speeds up processes
and workflows for greater efficiency.
• Supplier Self-Service for Registration and Product Catalog Upload
With Supplier 360, the supplier registration process allows suppliers to self-register with an
easy-to-use interface that provides the buyer’s organization with all required information,
including financial, tax, and compliance documents. Automating this procedure with the
application saves time and is a prerequisite to speed up the entire supplier onboarding process.
Once onboarded, suppliers can update information about their company and upload new
product catalogs at any time by accessing the integrated Product 360 view, ensuring that the
buyer always has the most current supplier and product data.
• Qualifying and Onboarding Suppliers
Using the Supplier 360 portal, manufacturers can manage the full life cycle of their supplier
data across regions and business units, replacing a previously disjointed approach. Through
a process-driven workflow, they can easily verify their suppliers’ information and documents
and qualify them for onboarding, or even offboarding, for reasons such as non-compliance.
This streamlines the entire qualification and approval process of new suppliers and speeds
up time to market.
Customers using Informatica’s MDM 360 solutions have reported increased business agility,
as indicated by these results:
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Ensure Global Consistency While Respecting Local Requirements
When marketing products internationally or operating abroad, industrial manufacturers need the
ability to centrally manage all product information for efficient interdepartmental collaboration
across applications and locations. Different countries present different challenges, such as the
localization of thousands or even millions of SKUs or different local assortments. Within the
entire assortment of a manufacturer, not all products in all variants may be sold in all countries or
regions, depending on the local demand and customer needs.
Regional teams also often deal with numerous ERP, PLM, marketing, e-commerce, and financial
systems with no central PIM system to feed sales channels. Often, e-commerce sites are
also managed locally using multiple, disparate platforms. As a result, there is no consolidated
database that provides teams with a single trusted view of product information.
This local autonomy can result in a lack of overall consistency, as well as:
• Redundant processes across different teams or applications
• Duplicate workflows across different regions
• Inconsistent product information
• Lack of a unified customer experience across online and offline channels and across regions
While the manufacturer strives for global synergies in processes, they must also respect local
differences in product design and marketing driven by:
• Regional service models, including expected delivery times and price points
• Local standards, such as NEMA vs. IEC electrical standards
• Market applications (e.g., integrated services vs. simple products)
When online and offline channel teams work in isolation, this often results in duplicate—and
sometimes conflicting—product images, descriptions, and other marketing collateral created for
core products. Instead of duplicating the creation of core product content, local teams should be
able to focus on specific local aspects of their product marketing content. This might include the
local bill-of-materials (product hierarchies), labeling regulation (ingredients, country of origin, etc.),
and translation of product information.
To successfully handle the challenges of managing a global business, industrial manufacturers
depend more than ever on a single source of supplier and product master data to ensure global
consistency and quality while respecting local market and compliance requirements.
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How MDM 360 Applications Can Help
PIM systems help many industrial manufacturers align regions, locations, teams, and systems.
Product 360 is specifically designed to serve as a single, enterprise-wide, and trusted source
for all product data. It preserves global processes, automates the sharing of core product data,
and provides a management framework for localization activities. These activities range from
language translation to localized product hierarchies and product bundles that cater to differing
regulatory requirements and market requirements.
Deliver an Integrated and Engaging Omnichannel Experience
More than 70 percent of B2B companies are at risk of losing customers by not fully engaging
them.3 Industrial manufacturing companies need to move beyond simply selling to their
customers to cultivating and owning relationships with them through compelling digital
experiences driven by content. They need to provide business-focused web platforms that are
much more than an online version of their product catalog and that allow them to efficiently
serve their direct customers as well as end customers. Customers, resellers, and local agents
are looking to be inspired, influenced, engaged, and reassured that they have selected the right
supplier or partner.
Omnichannel, in other words, is no longer only relevant for retailers. Manufacturers and brands
often sell direct and through channels to their B2B customers, distributors, retailers, or end
consumers. They are also looking for ways to have a direct relationship with their end customers
to understand product use, uncover new product opportunities, or deal with product quality
issues. Readily available and rich product data is key to both business practices. This can be
challenging for manufacturers who disseminate product information across multiple systems
and channels.
Product information management in industrial manufacturing is often influenced by the need
for detailed product descriptions. For an engaging omnichannel customer experience, they
need the ability to consolidate complex product information from multiple systems and
departments to fuel their different sales channels and marketing systems with consistent
and high-quality information.
Many manufacturers provide product configurators on their website. Configurators can serve to
interactively select different parts for an individually designed product online, or to understand
compatibility among products to ensure appropriate combinations. A product configurator not
fueled with current, consistent, and clean product information will ultimately result in product
exchanges and returns, culminating in a poor customer experience and brand image.
3 http://chiefexecutive.net/implementing-digital-customer-experience-manufacturing-industry/
Over 70% of B2B companies are at risk of losing customers by not fully engaging them.
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How MDM 360 Applications Can Help
Manufacturers who want to provide an engaging customer omnichannel experience use
Informatica’s Product 360 as a central solution to:
• Successfully publish consistent and high-quality product data to fuel a unified omnichannel
customer experience
• Access editable channel previews to better envision the customers’ shopping experience,
ensuring consistent branding and driving higher conversion rates
• Easily connect all key sales channels, e-commerce systems, e-procurement systems,
e-marketplaces, catalogs, mobile devices, and data synchronization
Catalog Creation: Digital and Print
It is common practice to publish customer-specific catalogs, accessible to employees within
the customer organization and reflecting negotiated pricing and delivery terms. Coupled with
the need to publish public catalogs, this can—without automation and the ability to reuse data
efficiently—easily generate a large overhead cost.
As a master data solution for omnichannel commerce, Product 360 also supports various
print publishing solutions and provides direct connection of print solutions for creative and
standardized catalogs.
The E-Catalogs Channel creates file-based outputs of product data for distribution to B2B
customers. This channel makes it easy to supply the customer data systems with valuable
product information in formats such as BMEcat, XML, and CSV.
Reduce Supply Chain Risk and Support Compliance
Ensuring and keeping the quality of product data safe along the entire product life cycle and
information supply chain is a key requirement. Embedded data governance and high-quality,
rich product information are prerequisites for providing consistent content to customers and
the partner ecosystem. If manufacturers are missing central data quality rules and lack mature
data quality tools that support intelligent and holistic data governance, they can’t successfully
fuel Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) and order management systems across channels with trusted,
secure, and governed product data.
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Manage and Support High-Quality Product Information
Manufacturers need a way to ensure high-quality, consistent product information is used along
the entire product life cycle. Informatica’s Product 360 comes with industry-leading data quality
capabilities,4 ensuring all product data is standardized. Data stewards can use automated data
validation rules and dashboards to make the right business decisions. Manufacturers can also
rely on embedded data governance capabilities to define clear rules for handling their data,
processes, and exceptions. Traffic light symbols in the data quality dashboard show a clear
assessment of the current product data quality.
Fuel Other Applications With Trusted Data
Based on high-quality product and supplier information, industrial manufacturers can manage
all supplier, component, and sales product content in one central location. In addition, they can
also fuel other business and analytical applications, including ERP, bidding, quotation, accounts
payable, invoicing, and sales channels with trusted, governed, relevant, and authoritative data.
Ensure Supplier Contract Compliance and Help With Pricing Negotiations
Ensuring high-quality, up-to-date data is a key requirement for building and maintaining
successful supplier relationships. When partnering with multiple suppliers and sub-suppliers
in different countries, it is essential to have a full understanding of who the suppliers are and
who they work with to ensure supply chain traceability, transparency, risk assessment, and
compliance. For many manufacturers, it is not always easy to find information such as who
the supplier is, what type of company they are, what they deliver, who they work with, who
their sub-suppliers and key contacts are, and how to reach them. With the ability to reuse data
efficiently, Supplier 360 provides a complete understanding of all supplier relationships, supplier
performance, compliance, and spend across the company and regions. The 360-degree view
helps procurement personnel manage contracts efficiently and negotiate the best possible
corporate discounts, pricing, and payment terms.
4 Informatica has been cited as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions.
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Use Cases and Best Practices in Industrial ManufacturingThe benefit of MDM solutions in industrial manufacturing is not merely theoretical. Many
manufacturers are already benefiting from the value of MDM in their organization. This value
stems from the ability of Informatica’s MDM solutions to support transformation of business
models by unleashing the disruptive power of product and supplier data.
1. Manufacturer of Security Technology Realizes Product Data Quality and Efficiency
Informatica MDM increases efficiency at a leading global manufacturer of security technology,
including door opening solutions and locks. The main drivers for leveraging MDM were to ensure
high data quality, maintain the quality level of their product master data during the entire product
life cycle, and automate data management processes. They were also looking to increase
efficiency in delivering product information to multiple channels, including their website and
printed catalogs, and to make more comprehensive product information available to their sales
teams and partners.
With Product 360, the manufacturer significantly increased automation of processes and
resource efficiency. The solution handles rich and complex product information (up to 70,000
variants) so that a far greater number (8,000 items) of products could be added to their website.
In addition to the web shop, Product 360 fuels other important sales channels with trusted,
authoritative, and governed data, including an online product configurator, e-catalogs, and
e-marketplaces (like Amazon or Conrad.de through BMEcats export). They reduced the time,
resources, and costs required to create their 13 printed catalogs via Werk II. Data quality and data
governance functionalities are embedded in Product 360, which helps define when a product is
ready to be released to the market. Internal sales teams and partners can now access required
product information in 17 languages from an accurate single source. In turn, they provide high-
quality information to customers and retailers in 106 countries, reducing the time required to
create personalized quotes.
2. Industry-leading Aerospace Manufacturer and Distributor Streamlines Product Life Cycle
The desire to reduce time to market and increase wallet share led a leading producer and
distributor of commercial and consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace
systems to consider MDM solutions. Objectives included increasing efficiencies in their product
onboarding process, and standardizing processes for data authoring, validation, and publishing.
Product 360 enabled a consolidated view of product information from numerous upstream
source systems, including Siebel, RAE Oracle, SAP, and SharePoint Workspace. Information
previously siloed across multiple business units is now aligned for over 100,000 products, thanks
to the introduction of an enterprise process methodology and the creation of standards for
product data. The automation of workflows, data quality and cleansing, and validation removed
business process redundancies and shortened item set-up time. Combined with a business-
friendly user interface, these market-leading data management capabilities increased the trust in,
and visibility of, product information.
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The company created holistic views of product data that incorporated images and other media
assets thanks to the integration of Product 360 with Adobe Digital Asset Management and
Scene 7. Similarly, the omnichannel capabilities of Product 360 streamlined the global syndication
and publication of data, as well as distribution of data in multiple languages to numerous sales
channels. Their Product 360 solution publishes cleansed and validated product data to over a
dozen downstream consuming systems with diverse requirements, including Hybris, Nashen,
SiteCore, and Apttus CPQ.
Product 360 has streamlined the company’s product onboarding process and driven efficiency
improvements by automating business rule execution, workflow task assignment, escalations,
data classification, and quality reporting. Clean and consistent product data is now centralized
and more readily available to customers through effective syndication across all channels.
3. Automotive Manufacturer Improves Customer Engagement and Marketing Efficiency
Without an MDM solution, one of the best-selling global luxury vehicle manufacturers lacked
the data consistency and clarity to easily support market-specific product offers. Their vehicles
typically contain thousands of functional components, tens of thousands of parts, and tens of
millions of lines of software code, supplied by thousands of manufacturers worldwide. Texts,
images, video, audio files, and documents for spare parts were siloed across different systems
and locations. Their partners and customers expected consistent and high-quality marketing text
and media for new vehicles and equipment. The manufacturer also wanted to streamline their
processes for creating and managing marketing text and media for aftersales. New business
models required an online shop for parts and accessories for their brands, in addition to fueling
their online car configurators with accurate product and spare part information.
For an engaging customer experience, the automotive company selected Product 360 with
embedded Data Quality. Today, Product 360 supports creation and curation of trusted spare part
content and descriptions for all car configurators globally, across all brands, options, models,
and series of a car. They manage spare part descriptions for 140 countries using Product 360
for consistent text information across multiple different languages.
Processes for text and media creation have been unified, leading to faster results and a shorter
time to market. The manufacturer also lowered costs in media production, while delivering
better consistency in the tonality of texts and images. Today, all regions, departments, and
systems have ready access to the latest marketing data. Marketing efficiency has been improved,
since data can be easily repurposed across marketing systems. With better access to existing
marketing text and media, the creation of redundant content has been reduced.
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4. Global Power Industry Manufacturer Modernizes Data Syndication to Customers
and Distributors
A global leader in the manufacturing and distribution of power management components and
solutions needed to centralize the aggregation of product master and critical operational data
for syndication to customers and distributors. Their objectives included the empowerment of
business users to create new syndication channels quickly and easily without IT involvement, and
to provide business users with a comprehensive set of data quality rules that could be enacted or
removed per syndication.
An integrated solution based on Product 360 and Informatica Data Quality enabled the
aggregation of legacy product master data and operational data from numerous ERP systems,
including both Oracle and SAP. Information previously aggregated via spreadsheets and
distributed manually in some cases are now automatically generated in multiple formats,
including XML, CSV, and Excel, based on the recipient’s requirements. New syndication channels
can be added, tested, and implemented in hours instead of weeks.
The business is engaged in a global rollout to one of their major industries and geographic
areas to implement the same consolidation and syndication capability. Business users can
distribute data easily and quickly in any of over 20 languages supported, in either imperial or
metric dimensions, and supporting multiple industry standard classification systems and
export formats.
5. Supplier Information Management at Manufacturer of Paints and Coatings
A global manufacturer of paints and coatings has a strong track record for their data-driven
initiatives. The company was even recognized with an award for an innovative supplier
information management project. The $4.5 billion company is using MDM to strategically manage
and share information about vendors and raw materials.
The manufacturer has multiple business units sourcing raw materials from thousands of vendors
around the globe with varying purchasing practices and based on various systems. As a result,
supplier data and raw materials data was often missing or wrong. This made it difficult to
calculate the total spend on raw materials or the total expedited freight costs.
“Our buying power was limited by the age and quality of available vendor and raw materials data.
That meant that our raw materials portfolio was proliferating, as was our vendor portfolio,” says
their global IT director. Employees used a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process to
consolidate vendor and raw materials data for reporting, which revealed that their buying power
was limited by the quality of available supplier and raw materials data.
The company determined that by better managing and sharing supplier and raw materials
data, they could gain economies of scale in purchasing to negotiate better pricing and payment
terms. They could also better understand relationships with vendors across the enterprise and
develop internal process efficiencies to realize additional savings. They chose Informatica MDM,
Informatica Data Integration, and Informatica Address Verification to strategically manage and
share their supplier and raw materials data for global operations.
Reduced time it takes to add, test and implement new syndication from weeks to hours.
1818
Informatica MDM manages the company’s vendor and raw materials data centrally on an
ongoing basis. The company now benefits from a single trusted source for data.
Realized and projected benefits include:
• Streamlined RFX processes to accelerate raw materials cost savings
• Reduced total number of raw materials SKUs and vendors
• Increased productivity of staff focused on pulling and maintaining data
• Consistent global data visibility that can be leveraged for contract negotiations,
due diligence reviews, process standardization, and reporting
This customer assessed the business value of this solution as follows:
Conservative Likely Optimistic
Benefit #1: Productivity Improvement from Reduced Complexity and Data Proliferation, and from Keeping Employees Across Organization Informed and Consistent
$12,304,875 $15,915,396 $19,762,375
Benefit #2: Support and Extend Initiative to Reduce Raw Material Spend
$6,000,000 $8,000,000 $10,000,000
Benefit #3: Reduced Effort Onboarding and Changing Customer Bill-To/Ship-To Data
$312,000 $390,000 $468,000
Benefit #5: Improved Material Efficiency $2,500,000 $3,750,000 $5,000,000
Benefit #7: Improved Sales Margin from Better Visibility into Customer Profile and History
$1,670,696 $3,722,584 $1,465,507
Benefit #8: Expedited Realization of M&A Synergies
$3,000,000 $4,500,000 $6,000,000
Benefit #9: Reduced Costs Associated with Employee Turnover
$328,000 $492,000 $656,000
Total Annual Benefits $26,115,571 $36,769,980 $43,351,882
1919
The Next Wave of Industrial Manufacturing LeadersLooking forward, successful industrial manufacturing leaders must build a strong ecosystem
that capitalizes on the promise of analytics and connectivity to maximize efficiency for
themselves, their partners, and their customers. To drive digital transformation, companies need
more than just the right technology; leaders also need to develop a foundation of high-quality
data built in a strong digital culture with the right skills. This can involve quite a bit of change in
an organization that must be driven by C-Suite leaders with the goal of creating a robust digital
and data management culture. Implementing a robust, scalable, and high-impact MDM solution
is a critical step forward for any manufacturer seeking to stay competitive in their market.
Partner AcknowledgmentWe would like to thank our partner Infoverity for their contribution to this white paper with real
use case examples.
Founded in 2011, Infoverity is a global professional services firm that has successfuly partnered
with Informatica on more than 100 MDM, PIM, Next Gen Analytics and Managed Services
projects that help clients in the retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, financial and healthcare
sectors to simplify and maximize the value of their information.
Infoverity, named Informatica’s Partner of the Year four times in the last five years, is also
recognized by IDG’s Computerworld as one of the Best Places to Work in IT, as a Wonderful
Workplace for Young Professionals, and as the #1 Best Place to Work in its category by
Columbus Business First. Infoverity’s global headquarters is in Dublin, Ohio, and additional
service and support teams are located in Spain, Germany and Russia.
SourcesIDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Manufacturing 2017 Predictions, 2016
PWC, Industry 4.0: Building the digital enterprise: Industrial manufacturing key findings, 2016
ChiefExecutive, Implementing the Digital Customer Experience in the Manufacturing
Industry, 2016
IN09_0119_03562Worldwide Headquarters 2100 Seaport Blvd., Redwood City, CA 94063, USA Phone: 650.385.5000, Toll-free in the US: 1.800.653.3871
© Copyright Informatica LLC 2019. Informatica, the Informatica logo, and Intelligent Data Platform are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica LLC in the United States and other countries. A current list of Informatica trademarks is available on the web at https://www.informatica.com/trademarks.html. Other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners. The information in this documentation is subject to change without notice and provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind, express or implied.