Overview

Rich master data is the essential lifeblood of a truly usable MDM repository, which must contain not only basic transactional data about each product (e.g. a part number, price, and short description), but also product attribute information, long descriptions, images, PDFs, and even more-detailed descriptive information, such as marketing text, features and bullets, and so on.

Moreover, in a master data management system such as MDM that supports single-source cross-media publishing, the master data must be properly structured to be fully searchable in a published electronic catalog, and also sufficiently rich and of sufficiently high-quality to satisfy the requirement for product families and structured table layouts in a published paper catalog. Finally, for the repository to be of any use, the master data must be comprehensive and up-to-date.

Unfortunately, most of what passes for master data is really just raw transactional data; truly rich master data usually does not exist, and often must be painstakingly created from scratch - and at great expense - for each MDM repository. And even if the raw master data exists in electronic format, it often resides in hundreds if not thousands of data sources in a variety of incompatible formats and structures that are completely different from that of the MDM repository.

Aggregating raw product data into something that deserves to be called rich master data has historically been an expensive and almost insurmountable challenge, one that requires a tremendous amount of manual preprocessing (which must be repeated for each source data file), as well as direct user intervention for exception handling on a record-by-record basis when the records are actually imported.

All this is history with the MDM Import Server, which solves the import challenge once and for all. It is a powerful tool that allows you to import data from virtually any flat or relational electronic source file (e.g. Access, Excel, delimited text, SQL, XML, and any ODBC-compliant source), and to completely restructure, cleanse, normalize, and rationalize raw data into rich master data as part of the import process itself.

The MDM Import Server features innovative, patent-pending functionality that reduce the time and effort required to import raw electronic data by a factor of 100–1000 times. Instead of performing the import a record at a time, as with other import tools, it allows you to preprocess the source data a field at a time, dramatically reducing from hours to literally minutes the amount of time spent processing each source data file. Perhaps most importantly, the MDM Import Server produces cleansed, normalized, and rationalized master data that is 100% accurate.

The MDM Java API allows you to submit data files for import through the MDM Import Server.

Sample Scenarios

Submit Data Files for Import