Leveraging APIs to Deliver Master Data for Digital Transformation

Uniting common business data with APIs

Companies today are going through a transformation of their businesses as they identify various ways to optimize data management initiatives across their enterprise. They are increasingly incorporating data and technology at a massive scale to ensure that they can enhance their relationships with their customers and partners. As these companies continue to refine their data assets using various software solutions, Dun & Bradstreet plays a crucial role by providing a single source of truth for the entire enterprise – Master Data.

Master Data unites common business data used across multiple systems, applications, and processes. (It’s not to be confused with master data management (MDM): Master Data is the foundational content an organization uses to fuel its MDM program.) In today’s world of continually advancing technologies, companies are faced with having to manage huge volumes of data. The data is often spread across numerous business silos, which creates a headache for organizations in handling all these disparate data stores.

Ayan Basu, Product Director for Master Data at Dun & Bradstreet , explains: “Thanks to the structure and accuracy of Master Data, organizations find it easier to manage, integrate, and extract insight from disjointed data sources. Used with a powerful API, Master Data can, for example, help two internal teams such as operations and procurement work more safely and efficiently together.” This is important because teams may rely on an ERP and a procurement supply chain management system to do their jobs. Master Data allows them to work from the same core set of data – which uniquely identifies different entities with whom they do business.

Bridging the Gap With APIs

APIs have a long-standing history of bridging the gap between different sources of technology or programming. They allow you to interact and control functions in an agreed-upon manner. While Master Data can bring structure, order, and a collection of other benefits, it cannot merely be handed over as a simple file and be expected to work with any MDM program or enterprise system. One of the most effective ways to make Master Data work properly is to use APIs to deliver it and related technology to customers’ MDM workflows. Dun & Bradstreet’s advanced suite of APIs allows the automation of business process workflows, which helps ensure our clients obtain customer data of the best quality and highest integrity.

MDM APIs for Marketing & Sales, Finance, and Beyond

Powerful MDM solutions can be built for enterprises by leveraging APIs and enabling Master Data workflows. Through custom API integrations, companies can easily de-duplicate their records by using the Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S® Number to tie customer, vendors, and partners together with a standard structure. Powerful matching logic can enhance MDM software matching to get to a single, trusted record. Additionally, accurate linkage data can provide clear insight into corporate hierarchies and family-tree-structure data that can be used, for example, in sales territory planning. APIs vastly simplify a company’s MDM implementation process, enabling the firm to achieve a common, standardized, enterprise-wide view of its data structure quickly and efficiently.

Master Data APIs for Improved Workflow

Traditional MDM deployment – by ingesting and processing data files from a variety of sources – can be a time-consuming and costly effort for organizations, requiring significant IT overhead and resources. Easy-to-use, prebuilt integrations for major MDM providers greatly ease the burden and expense for companies standing up their own MDM systems. Our customers can often gain immediate value from Master Data in their MDM systems by using Dun & Bradstreet’s integrated APIs. We can easily develop configurable workflows and automated processes used for downstream applications, removing the need for tedious manual processing of large batch files.

Monitoring APIs monitoring are an additional feature that can be quite useful to companies. Mr. Basu adds, “With monitoring APIs integrated into MDM software, up-to-date, refreshed records can be pushed out automatically to companies’ data stores. Enterprises no longer need to deal with data degradation and can rely on data sources to regularly provide ongoing data-quality updates.”

As more and more data floods the enterprise, Dun & Bradstreet helps customers bring it all together by leveraging these prebuilt API integrations and connectors within an organization’s MDM software systems. Dun & Bradstreet simplifies the MDM implementation process for our customers by providing best-in-class Master Data, allowing our customers to find truth and meaning in their data.