Event Preview: Solving Customer Master Data Challenges at Community Summit 2025

This article is sponsored by HSO.

Community Summit North America returns this season, starting on October 19 in Orlando, Florida. Ahead of this year’s event, MSDW spoke with HSO’s data architect Todd Dickerson and lead technical consultant Zain Baquar about their joint session on customer master data and the broader data management trends for customers attending Summit 2025.

Dickerson and Baquar will present Solving Customer Master Data Challenges for a 360° View in Dynamics 365 CE (CRM) and F/SCM (FO), a session focused on improving customer master data management. Dickerson said that organizations face a range of common challenges trying to control data across their range of business systems.

There are numerous challenges with bringing together data from multiple data sets to get clean, golden records at the end of the process. Whether [you are using] CRM or homegrown systems, data is often not kept in sync. It gets entered one place and you forget to update it elsewhere. What is the correct email address? You might have the same customer record but three different emails. How do you merge that data together? 

To avoid “garbage in, garbage out” scenarios, companies need to be mindful that they are not missing sales data or inaccurately attributing figures to a different customer. Baquar added that the concepts they share can extend to other master data management scenarios: 

This could be applicable not just for customers, but can also apply to corporate entities and product information. Anywhere you’re collecting this master data, it needs to be differentiated in system where captured. 

The two business apps professionals plan to discuss metrics that administrators and analysts can use to manage the health of their data. The benefits of improving data quality apply to current processes and business goals, but Baquar explained that this type of work also pays off on future initiatives. 

“[It’s vital to be able to] query to create visualizations,” he said. The goal with improved master data management is to be ready for AI, so that it’s possible to do AI modeling with the cleanest possible data. “[At this year’s event] people will be talking about consolidating data and extracting insights.”

Baquar encouraged attendees to go through the catalog of events to identify sessions of interest. He will be presenting another session with a different HSO colleague on delivering scalable AI solutions. 

According to Dickerson, attendees should watch and listen for Microsoft’s broader data management, analytics, and AI story at this year’s event. 

This is a community user group. We work in Fabric [and with Microsoft business apps tools]. As much as we work in these things every day, I think many folks are just scratching the surface and aren’t sure how to consolidate data and start down this road. They may be thinking about where to use AI but are not sure about the value they can get out of it. I think there will be a lot of questions from people looking for more [insight] at the conference.

Dickerson also encouraged undecided customers to come to Orlando. In his experience, the unexpected benefits of attending often prove to be the most valuable.

It is always an eye-opening experience and a great way to get a break from the day to day and to be exposed to ideas and concepts you might not even have been thinking about. After attending collaborative events like this, you can bring home new thoughts and ideas to improve your business. It’s generally a fantastic way to broaden horizons, learn new topics, and potentially bring them back to your organization. 

More from HSO: 

Explore Master Data Strategy with HSO at Summit NA 2025

Catch HSO’s Todd Dickerson and Zain Baquar in Orlando as they tackle real-world customer master data challenges in their session, Solving Customer Master Data Challenges for a 360° View in Dynamics 365 CE and F/SCM. Learn how to unify fragmented records, improve data quality, and lay the groundwork for AI-driven insights.

Visit HSO at Booth #209 to continue the conversation and see how clean, connected data can transform your CRM and ERP experience.