Master data management and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3: Who can benefit

Data management topics have garnered plenty of attention in the ERP space in recent years. And for those organizations that run Microsoft Dynamics AX, a related domain will be taking center stage with the upcoming release of AX 2012 R3 - Master Data Management, or MDM.

Gartner defines MDM as "a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency, and accountability of the enterprise's official shared master data assets." MDM helps to reduce inconsistencies and errors across those assets, and, according to Gartner, it achieves that goal by using a consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes to describe the core entities of the enterprise - including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies, and chart of accounts.

MDM has been on the table for Dynamics ERP for years now. Microsoft technical fellow Mike Ehrenberg told MSDynamicsWorld.com back in 2010 that the Dynamics R&D team was already working on it.   

MDM's applicability extends across all companies and industries, says Arif Vadsarya, a technical consultant for AX Pulse, a Microsoft Dynamics AX consultancy. And while MDM is foreign to some ERP users, Vadsarya notes that the concept itself isn't new. "Master Data Management has been around for some time now," he notes, "with its main differentiator from traditional data management being the fact that MDM does not encompass transactional data; only master data."

Applicable Across the Board

While MDM technology is not right for every organization, it can apply to many different industries and organizations. A global distribution firm that's doing business ...