Have you ever thought through how MDM differs in a multinational company from MDM in a only nationally focused company?

Do you remember my blog post how to organize for MDM? There I described how you should organize your MDM activities in principle. If you are working for a big multinational company you might have thought that this is by far to simple to solve your challenges. 

And you are right!

In a multinational company you have on top of the generic MDM specific tasks additional challenges which you have to address within your organization, your processes and your IT infrastructure (esp. in your metadata model).

Even if you start looking in the data of multinational products you can find very serious challenges for MDM.

Global, regional and local products: In an multinational environment you typically find global products which are sold and relevant to all regions or countries. But you also find products which are region specific (eg. only for the European or Asian market) and also very local products which might be available and target only on one country. Typically you want your local organizations to be able to list and sell the local products while the global products are more or less defined by a central business unit.

Global, regional and local elements in global products: If you have global products which are available in different regional or even local markets you typically have some product information which is really only targeted on local requirements. One good example for those types of requirements is the requirement for the “green dot” information in germany (which by the way became obsolete again due to changed legislations). This information was only relevant if you wanted to sell a product to germany. But even if it was the same product globally, for germany you specifically had to add the information whether the product had the “green dot” certificate or not.

Multi-branded products: Multiple brandings can occure for the same product already from the industry side, but it is even more common in retail where you have two retail brands owned by one company and therefore sharing a big part of their assortment. But when presenting to the market they want to describe the same product typically in different ways to the market to clearly differentiate their products from each other.

How does all of this impact your organization and processes?

If you are a multinational company you will have a strategy which will also cover the parameters “need for integration” and “need for local responsibility”. These two parameters define quite well your internationalization strategy. The same you have to apply to your master data management.

In the end you have to setup a distributed organization for your MDM. A quick shot might look like this: