When an organization wants to sell across markets and continents, disparate local data management strategies aren’t going to cut it.
Instead, organizations need strong data governance to streamline operations, grow a global presence, and better serve retailers and customers.
The three speakers in the session “Advancing Data Quality and Organizational Governance in an Omnichannel World” all faced the challenge of aligning international teams on an approach to data governance that guaranteed consistent data quality.
All three not only achieved this goal but did so in a way that positioned them for future growth.
The first step to aligning data is to align all the teams that touch that data, making it possible to work across locations and functions.
“We spent a lot of time aligning with the ecommerce teams, both global and local, to implement data standards,” says Katie Hull, senior manager of product information management (PIM) activation at Coty, Inc.
Rupal Patel, product owner at Le Creuset, also prioritized alignment across stakeholders, creating a “Salsify Council” to do so.
For ecommerce data governance, Patel explains, “The council is [bringing] a bunch of experts together, and they become the taskforce for all the issues that happen within the business.”
Similarly, Ryan Anderson, senior director of marketing and e-business at Hansgrohe North America, shared that an e-business team was created as part of Hansgrohe’s initiative to improve data governance.
“ ... Everyone knows their part, everyone knows what the outcome is that we’re trying to get to,” Anderson says on aligning their teams.
With all stakeholders aligned, the speakers’ organizations are able to more effectively centralize and aggregate their data.
Hull explained that after Coty, Inc.’s various ecommerce teams had worked together to develop data standards, they were able to introduce improved workflows that ensured data quality in a centralized location.
“The result of this is one source of truth — or rather an aggregated source of truth because we’ve been able to create integrations with our ERP [enterprise resource planning] and DAM [digital asset management],” Hull says.
Patel also explained how Le Creuset used new workflows and processes to standardize and centralize data.
“And naturally, through the integrations of technologies, we’re able to leverage from a single source of truth,” she says.
Similar data quality improvements happened at Hansgrohe.
“[Setting up] new products [is] just a slam dunk now that we have our new standards,” Anderson says. “It’s really efficient.”
Hull shared that her team has discovered new efficiencies as well.
“Because we’ve been able to standardize copy … Whenever we create new channels, we can easily map them using similar formulas and get the data to the retailers in the way that they need it with very little intervention by the local ecommerce teams,” she says.
Patel’s team has seen a number of benefits.
“We are looking to gain substantial time and cost savings through the leaner processes … We’ve been able to enhance a multichannel experience,” she says.
Additionally, she says, by centralizing information, they have more transparency while mitigating risks.
Strong data quality and governance start with getting a group of stakeholders aligned on the most pressing needs.
Once that foundation is set, the stories of this session’s speakers reveal that it’s possible to overhaul processes and implement new technologies that allow for a single source of trustworthy data, resulting in a myriad of benefits.