How Effective Golden Record Management Can Uncover New Opportunities for Manufacturing M&A

M&A has a huge role in the manufacturing sector regarding overall business strategy. In fact, growing or expanding through M&A now has strategic implications in the technology world. It is not just about integrating balance sheets, but integrating operations and, most critically, integrating the right data.

The main purpose of M&A in Manufacturing is to create immediate revenue synergies. However, sometimes IT integration delays this. Sales teams responsible for achieving combined revenue targets work with two siloed, conflicting, and incomplete data sets (Customer, Product, etc.). This is where establishing a Golden Record comes into play.

What is Golden Record Management? 

Golden Record is the single most complete and trusted version of a data entity, such as a consumer or product, created by merging, cleansing, and streamlining data from different systems. Further, the golden record management is a process that removes data silos, improves data quality, and enable better decision-making. A successful golden record management strategy provides the sales team with the real-time and unified data, needed for identifying and pursuing new business opportunities.

The M&A Data Challenges for Manufacturers

Manufacturing M&As presents a unique data complexity, circling around key domains such as Product, Customer, Supplier/Vendor, and Location/Asset. Before any integration, the two merging companies operate with parallel universes of data. This creates a data void during the crucial post-merger period. At that point, the reliance on only ERP migrations can cause slow, costly, and conflicting data sets.

The Challenge: The combined sales team functions with two different and fragmented data universes in the following manner:

• Duplicate Customer Data: The data for a customer is replicated multiple times. This results in a falsely low perception of the overall value.
• Fragmented Product Data: Variations in part numbers, description, and units of measurement for similar products.
• Wasted Effort: The sales and marketing team spends a lot of time resolving inconsistent data that exists in various systems, causing them to postpone market engagement.

Moreover, it can further prevent the combined sales force from seeing the True Account Value and immediate Cross-Sell/Up-Sell opportunities

The traditional method of M&A implementation involves an elaborate and expensive process of migrating the entire data into a single, unified ERP system, which is typically slow and does not offer a true image of the consolidated data. After an M&A, the expectations are always high for immediate realization. This is where the Golden Record approach serves as the strategic solutions.

Finding New Opportunities with Golden Records

Having duplicate customer records is a challenge that arose as a result of the merger and acquisition where the acquiring company and the acquired company sold similar products to a prospect but treated them as two separate entities.

Golden Record Management Strategy turns these separate entities of information into a direct revenue generator. It diverts the necessity for a full, slow ERP migration by acting as a translation layer that quickly creates a single source of truth, the Golden Record, for key domains (Customer, Product, Supplier, and more).

Customer Golden Record

Data is pulled from all applicable source systems, and then an intelligent matching and deduplication process (based on customer ID, address, contact) is performed to merge duplicate records (e.g., “ABC Inc. (Acquirer)” and “XYZ Corp. (Acquired)”) into a single, unified view.

Impact: This will automatically reveal the customer’s True Combined Lifetime Value, justifying dedicated strategic resources.

• Identify True Account Value: When a customer’s transaction data is combined, the entire sales team can immediately view the total revenue that has been truly earned by a customer.
• Discover Underserved Divisions: In this case, if one of the companies was doing business with the customer’s Manufacturing Division while the other was doing business with their R&D Division, this data can be found in the Golden Record.

Product Golden Record

Golden Record is the most accurate and unified view of the product and standardizes the product/material considered; part numbers, technical specs into a standardized data model.

Effect: By integrating the Customer Golden Record with the Product Golden Record, the sales team can execute the following actions:

• Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Identification: Conduct a gap analysis to identify cross-sell/up-sell opportunities (eg, identify people who bought which product from the acquired company but not the required part from the acquiring company).
• Speed and Agility: Enable automated data conflict resolution and supply high-quality, actionable data to the CRM system even prior to the full ERP integration being complete.
• Prevent Relationship Deterioration: The salesperson can also view all recent and relevant interactions (service tickets, past orders, status of payments) from both legacy system environments, making sure customer communications remain relevant and contextual, hence strengthening the relationship.
• Targeted and Personalized Outreach: The Golden Record possesses the latest and most verified contact details (phone numbers, emails, and the preferred contact name) pulled from all sources, which gives the sales team a push in eliminating wasted efforts on duplicate data and allows outreach campaigns to provide effective results.

The major value from Golden Record management comes from consolidating fragmented customer information into a single “Customer 360-degree View.” The unified record gives an apt assessment and a better sales pipeline.

Why Choose Pimcore MDM for Building Golden Record Management Strategy?

MDM solutions are the primary tools to achieve golden record management. Pimcore offers an integrated platform for Product Information Management (PIM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and Master Data Management (MDM) to tackle any data challenge for manufacturers. This integrated capability provides unique advantage in manufacturing M&A.

1. Easily Establish the Multi-Domain MDM Hub

You can make use of Pimcore immediately and risk-free as the central data hub acting as a translator layer between the legacy systems of the acquired and acquiring companies.

• Schema Mapping: Quickly map the diverse set of data fields (schemas) of the two companies’ source systems (typically SAP and/or Oracle and/or legacy) to the new and common set of fields in the Pimcore MDM.
• Domain Flexibility: Involves simultaneous ingestion and structuring of data from the Customer domain and the Product domain, realizing that a customer purchases a product.

2. Powerful Features to Create Golden Records

The key to the strategy is that it leans on the Pimcore powerful data quality and workflow features to enforce data governance and deliver the single source of truth:

• Intelligent Matching and Deduplication: Pimcore applies intelligent algorithms to identify possible duplicates across different domains. For its clients, Pimcore matches on criteria such as Tax ID number, corporate address, key contact name, and key contact phone number, regardless of Customer ID numbers.
• Strategic Layer: The rules for conflict resolution are created in the acquiring company through automated tools, handled in the Pimcore workflow engine.

a. Customer Rule Example: When merging “ABC Inc. (Acquirer)” and “XYZ Corp. (Acquired),” the rule might be: Prioritize the Acquirer’s Customer ID, the Acquired company’s most recent address, and the combined, reconciled transaction history.
b. Product Rule Example: For a material record, the rule might be: Always use the Acquiring Company’s unit of measure and the Acquired Company’s technical specification, as it is more detailed.

3. Strong Data Stewardship Workflow

Pimcore’s workflow engine helps you create your own Data Steward for any given record if there is a low-confidence match or a conflict of concern. There will never be a bottleneck during data accuracy checks.

Also Read: How Pimcore Platform Spells Innovation for Your Business?

In What Way Does Pimcore Aid Sales Teams?

Once the Golden Customer Record is created and harmonized across the joint sales teams’ CRM, it opens up an entire universe of new lucrative opportunities:

First Use Case: Discovering Actual Account Value

A typical sales rep usually deals with accounts according to what is apparent from their historical CRM. The Golden Record immediately fixes this misinformation:

• The Invisible Customer: Combine two separate records—Customer A and Customer B—into one Golden Record to form a unified identity.
• Immediate Insight: The sales team is able to view the Actual Total Lifetime Value as opposed to the previous projection calculated from a different system.

Benefits:

• Focused Planning: By automatically qualifying for the Key Account Management program, your business will receive focused planning efforts, as well as executive engagement.
• Resource Allocation: The best sales people can be allocated to high-value accounts, ensuring a high degree of service continuity and attention.

Second Use Case: Product Gap Analysis | Strategic Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

The combination of Pimcore’s PIM (Product Golden Record) and MDM (Customer Golden Record) constituents then emerges as the sales teams’ most potent weapon.

• Unified Product Visibility: The salesperson reviews the Golden Record and identifies two streams of purchase history: they purchased ‘Product A’ from the Acquired Company, but they have never purchased the ‘Value-Added Service’ or the ‘Consumable’ from the Acquiring Company.
• Targeted Outreach: Rather than using generic offers, the sales force could utilize the Golden Record to provide highly targeted and relevant cross-sell proposals. These proposals are presented as official, guaranteed-to-be-compatible parts or product offerings perfectly matched with those already purchased by customers.
• Predictive Selling: Analyzing buyer behaviour on merged Golden Records allows a sales team to determine who has a high probability of accepting a cross-sale offer. This allows a predictive score to be assigned to a lead.

Third Use Case: Improved Customer Experience

Amidst the post-merger confusion, consistency avoids customer turnover.

• Single View of Interaction: Initially, the sales representative will reference the interaction in the Golden Record to get the single view of interaction. The sales representative will then know the last sales order of interaction in one system and the last three open service requests of interaction in another system.
• Informed Conversation: Just think about a salesperson beginning a conversation like this: “I noticed that you just received your order, and I also noted that there is an open service ticket. What I want to assure you of is that this is a priority for us.” This level of understanding can take mere transactions with your brand and turn them into conversations that build confidence.
• Outcome: The seamless service experience offered by businesses will help to instill trust in the new entity, enhance the relationship, boost satisfaction, and ensure retained or repeat sales.

Read Success Story: The Unified Golden Record for Products, Customers and Vendors

Conclusion

You won’t get real value from mergers and acquisitions unless your people can capture the combined data synergies over time. When your data integration process is slow, the result can be costly returns, delayed new initiatives, and additional operational work.

To cut through the barriers and accelerate your mergers and acquisitions value, you have to ensure the combined entity realizes its revenue synergies quickly, turning the M&A from a data integration challenge into a powerful competitive advantage. A robust Golden Record Management is the front-line enablement for the sales team during a manufacturing M&A.

Want to discuss how Happiest Minds can help you with the Golden Record Management strategy for more accurate sales pipeline?

Schedule a Demo here.