When was the last time you evaluated your master data for a TPM implementation? Below, we explore three categories of master data to evaluate, cleanse, and implement in order to drive efficiencies and improved effectiveness throughout your organization. 

Are you thinking about implementing a new TPM tool? Or maybe you’ve already started the process to implement a new TPM tool? 

If the answer is yes, have you also considered the quality of your master data, particularly around your product and customer hierarchy and key attributes?  

Master data is often overlooked in a TPM implementation, with most people thinking that because their master data set up and existing data has worked well enough for them so far, they can continue leveraging it in the same way with a new system. However, master data, and specifically product and customer hierarchies, are the foundation of not just a successful TPM implementation but successful usage of the new tool by your end users after implementation.   

If your master data isn’t set up prior to the implementation of your new TPM tool, this could negatively affect forecasting, promotion planning, settlements, and post-promotion. By implementing a new TPM tool, you have the opportunity to not just input a new tool into your sales planning ecosystem, but truly transform the processes in which your organization and employees engage and collaborate within the sales planning process.  

You might be asking, “So if I don’t clean up and harmonize my organization’s master data, that’s bad, but what exactly are the benefits my organization and people could reap from cleansing the master data in our ecosystem? And what would we even clean up or action on?” 

Evaluating and Cleansing Your Master Data for a TPM Implementation  

1. Product and Customer Hierarchy Data 

The first category within the TPM-related master data space to evaluate would be your product and customer hierarchies as well as other ways your accounts may be organized in your ecosystem. When was the last time that you made any changes to the hierarchy or actually sat down with the different functional groups that use the hierarchy to see how they tactically leverage the different hierarchy levels that currently exist today?  

Chances are there may be a level or grouping that made sense when you first created and implemented this current version of your hierarchies, but they don’t quite make sense for how your business works today and aren’t meeting your organizational needs. To evaluate this, some key questions to ask yourself and your key functional groups are: 

• Are all of your customers currently planned at the same level? If they’re not, is this approach something that you want to continue into your new TPM system, and does it really enable efficiency? Do your hierarchies and current set up of customer attributes truly enable your planning process, or do your users have a number of exceptions to the processes for hierarchy usage? 
• Does the setup of your organization’s planning accounts make sense for how your business plans today? Are your customers segmented in a way that maximizes efficiencies for smaller customers while also prioritizing larger or more strategic customers? Do you use an attribute like customer segmentation for this? 
• Does your product hierarchy structure make sense for your sales team and for demand, supply, and marketing? Are your PPGs (Promoted Product Group) organized with clear rules and consistency to best serve the way promotions are forecasted, planned, funded, and then evaluated/analyzed afterwards? 
• Are both your customer and product hierarchies set up in a way that allow for post-promotion evaluation? Anyone who’s been close to data has heard the age old saying – “garbage in equals garbage out.” Without accurate and cleansed data going into your promotions, your teams will not be able to get any data from your promotions to accurately use throughout reporting or KPI. 

2. Active Product Data 

The second category would be to evaluate would be your list of active products and/or the tools you use to assign products to various customers. Implementing a new TPM tool provides the perfect opportunity to clean up this master data because this category is almost guaranteed to not be cleansed simply because of how many different teams or people use and/or change this type of data regularly. Some key questions to ask here are: 

• Are your products being regularly deactivated in order to maximize your current TPM system performance? Is there a process for your end users to follow in order to deactivate products? 
  • Do you have any one-time displays or seasonal/holiday offerings that are still active years after they’ve stopped being sold? This can cause risk to system performance and can also lead to less accurate promotions if these items that aren’t sold are added to promotional events accidentally. This can also negatively impact forecasts. 
• Do you have an authorized distribution list (ADL) in place and being used? 
  • ADLs are critical to maximizing efficiencies throughout your TPM system by ensuring planning accuracy for customers, creating more realistic forecasts and allowing product input into events quicker while leaving less room for human error. ADLs are also much more efficient and effective for users if the product data and PPGs that go into them are already cleansed.  
  • If products aren’t actively being deactivated (or there’s no deactivation process that currently exists), ADLs are likely your best stop gap to prevent products that are no longer sold from being added to events they shouldn’t be. 

3. Master Data Governance   

The third major category is your master data governance process. The longevity of your cleansed master data will only be as good as the robust processes you put in place to govern the master data. Cleaning up master data will be pointless if you don’t also implement governance processes to keep them clean. Otherwise, you’ll face these same master data challenges in just a few short years, possibly shorter depending on the size of your organization.  

Our recommendation is that there should be a singular business owner role for each hierarchy level and attribute for both customers and products, and it likely makes the most sense for the owners to be the people that create the data or feel the impact most when the data is incorrect. A few master data items to consider implementing a governance process for are: 

• Adding a new customer 
• Editing customer hierarchy levels 
• Deactivating a customer 
• Adding a product 
• Editing product hierarchy levels 
• Deactivating a product 
• Editing a customer’s ADL 

Getting the Most Out of Your TPM Master Data  

Master data can be a little overwhelming simply because there can be so much of it with so many people and functions inputting and changing it all the time. But with the right cleansing effort and concurrent governance processes implementation, you can truly set your CPG organization up for success for many years to come throughout so many different business functions.   

Reach out to our team if you’re ready to start your TPM master data cleansing journey or have any questions. 

Contributions by Meg Longwell