Kalido

A Dynamic Information Warehouse is a data platform approach for storing, modeling, and delivering data about your business in a format that is flexible, adaptable, and built to scale. Rather than static data warehouses that make ongoing adaptation difficult after being built, DIWs are designed to be modifiable. They can support multiple hierarchy versions (e.g. product lines, organizational structures, etc.), “what-was” vs. “what-is” analysis, “what-if” scenarios, and quick changes as your business evolves (without heavy programming).

The primary difference is that traditional data warehouses are typically rigid, making structural changes cumbersome. On the other hand, DIWs support versioning of models and hierarchies, so business-wide changes can be made much faster. Traditional warehouses often lean on separate tools for master data management, while DIWs like Kalido have MDM built in or tightly integrated so changes propagate across your data.

MDM aims to create a centralized “golden copy” of key business entities like customers, products, suppliers, geographies, and more. This ensures consistent definitions, eliminates duplicates, and propagates definitions across disparate systems.

The process usually starts with discovery and data profiling, where all master data sources (ERPs, CRMs, etc.) are identified and evaluated for inconsistencies, duplications, and missing values. A business model is then defined to determine which attributes matter most, followed by cleansing and consolidation to standardize formatting. Once you have clean data, MDM tools like Kalido can push it to other systems like ERPs, data warehouses, reporting tools, and other downstream operational apps. As the business and data changes, you’ll need to update MDM models, reference data, and perform other system maintenance to keep it accurate.

Master data management is critical for modern businesses because of the problems it prevents. Without effective MDM, different systems often have inconsistent or conflicting data that can cause poor decision-making and duplication of efforts. Data errors can also degrade analysis accuracy and reporting quality, which further slows down responsiveness to change. Without clear audit trails and a unified view of master entities, it opens organizations to more compliance risks, especially when operating across multiple regions or in regulated industries. Companies that lack effective MDM tools also report a higher total cost of ownership due to the manual efforts, integration overhead, and maintenance of multiple silos.

MDM software is the digital tools that help organizations like yours implement effective master data management. Key features and capabilities of MDM software include:

• Data profiling
• Business data modeler
• Reference data management
• Matching, merging, and deduplication tools
• Workflow and stewardship tools
• Audit and traceability tools
• Ability to distribute, synchronize, and publish master data to other systems

Kalido MDM supports not just product or customer data, but also multiple data domains, business modeling, governance, workflows, synchronization, versioning, and more.

Combining master data management and dynamic information warehousing into a single unified platform (like Kalido) provides several advantages, especially for businesses looking to enhance agility and consistency without increasing complexity. These benefits include:

• Tighter integration between master data and reporting, eliminating lag between source changes and analytics rework.
• Reduced duplication of effort and fewer moving parts so you don’t need glue code or extra ETL work, minimizing potential failure points.
• Faster response time to business change so you can evolve via new products, reorganizations, or regulations without having to rebuild your systems.
• Better governance and trust come from the unified and consistent data definitions, workflows, and audit trails.
• Total cost of ownership is driven down by the automation of modeling, versioning, matching, and maintenance so your team doesn’t have to manually code reworks.
• Enhanced support for global organizations that often use multiple ERPs, many source systems, different geographies, and evolving hierarchies.

Kalido (now part of insightsoftware) is a suite of tools that provides automated master data management and dynamic information warehouse capabilities. Kalido is designed to help enterprises model, define, manage, and distribute business data in a manner that supports change, governance, scalability, and data trust.

Kalido’s combination of MDM and DIW capabilities makes it ideal for complex or global organizations looking to simplify their data management. It also has model-driven environments that make it easy to define hierarchies, reference data, and attributes without complex programming. While many MDM tools have basic matching, cleansing, and deduplication capabilities, Kalido’s stand out from the industry via stronger automation and lifecycle management features and more efficient scalability for growing enterprises.

Yes. One of Kalido’s differentiators is its ability to integrate with a wide variety of other systems. It works with ERPs and operational systems like CRMs, BI tools for reporting, and other upstream and downstream applications.