Success story

Master data management for a nonprofit foundation

By David Aburto

Our client (the Foundation) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the frontiers of mathematics and basic sciences. The Foundation provides grants in four areas: Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Autism Research, and Outreach & Education. These initiatives pursue potentially ground-breaking projects that demand sophisticated management, financial analysis, and detailed tracking of project milestones and results.

Background and Challenges

The Foundation's finance department was using Excel spreadsheets to track performance statistics crossing the many domains it supports, including cost centers, events, awards, and ongoing investments. Such limited technology made data quality and governance very difficult. Updates were an expensive and risk-prone manual process.  

Keyrus proposed and implemented Semarchy to eliminate these costs and risks. Semarchy is a Master Data Management platform that maintains a golden record as a single source of truth across an organization.  

Approach and Key Success Factors

Keyrus used a four-phase methodology to implement Semarchy: Discover, Design, Build, and Deploy.

1. Discover: During the discovery phase, Keyrus met with finance and technical experts to attribute definitions, review existing procedures for updating data, and review the frequency of those updates.

2. Design: Keyrus built an Entity-Relationship model to unify the Foundation's domains under Semarchy. This model led to the creation of a Data Catalog that documented required meta-data and necessary data validations and transforms. Keyrus designed a Semarchy UI to meet end-user expectations.

3. Build: Keyrus created and installed the many pieces required by this project. These included SQL Server database objects and Semarchy components such as data validations, UI prototypes, workflows, automated email notifications, and role-based security. After demonstrating this implementation, Keyrus worked with end-users in a rigorous UAT regimen.

4. Deploy: As it always does, the UAT process brought forth possible refinements and improvements. With those improvements implemented, Keyrus deployed the solution to the Foundation’s production environment. The solution is used by their finance team and administered by their technical team. Implementing Semarchy has streamlined the finance team's processes, brought data quality to the forefront, and provided an audit trail that tracks attribute-level changes.

Deliverables

• An Entity Relationship Diagram (model) that defined all tables, attributes, and data types required by the system;

•  A Data Catalog used as a reference for all meta-data related to the Semarchy implementation, including data validations and attribute definitions;

• An on-premises Semarchy Platform which the finance team uses daily to track all master attributes, replacing far less capable spreadsheet technology.

Results

The solution centralized data quality and data governance functions and streamlined audit trails. These improvements allow the Foundation to reduce hours of work on manual updates, allowing their finance team to work more efficiently on other tasks. High data quality also allows the finance team to create awards and grants quicker, leading to more potentially ground-breaking projects.