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📽️ Check out a video demonstration for this use case, here.

#B3F5FF

Business Use Case Summary

Master Data and General System Setup

In this use case,

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you can load and configure

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essential master data

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within the Pricefx system, which serves as the backbone of the pricing application, including product and customer information, transactional history, currency details, and units of measurement.

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Additionally, we will need to perform some standard administrative, security and integration setup for our application.

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titleUser Role(s) and Business Objective

Pricing or Product Manager or Sales Rep

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Key challenges include identifying and importing necessary master data, determining inbound data values for analytical dashboards, and managing security through user permissions and Single Sign-On (SSO). The benefits of this implementation include developing an integration plan to migrate data into Pricefx’s flexible model, optimizing data configurations for performance, establishing robust user access controls, and providing access to 25 pricing performance benchmarks for comparative analysis.

🎯 Business Objectives

  1. Data Integration

  2. Optimized Data Configuration

  3. User Access Control

  4. Performance Benchmarks

  5. Reliable Comparison Metrics

⌚ Time Estimation

N/A

👥 Stakeholders

Pricing Managers and Sales Representatives who want to have basic master data in their system, like product master, customer master, transaction data, currency data and Product Unit of Measure data. Admins looking to set up roles and entitlements, SSO and Plasma set up.

During the Prescriptive Delivery Workshop (pre-SOW), Solution Sales will discuss more in detail with the Customer the requirements, and this page will serve as a starting point towards a fully Customer specific requirement list, together with the appropriate agreed delivery approach.

Business Context (Use Case Description)

Implementing this use case includes a comprehensive integration plan to migrate essential data into Pricefx’s flexible data model, optimizing data configurations to enhance system performance.

Robust user access controls are established to protect sensitive information, while users gain access to 25 pricing performance benchmarks presented in easy-to-understand visuals that help answer important analytical questions via Plasma.

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Plasma dashboards, click here.

Tip

NOTE: Commonly asked questions on Pricefx Plasma about data confidentiality and sharing can be found here.

Additionally, Pricefx Plasma allows for reliable comparison metrics, enabling users to measure their performance against industry standards.

However, you must first address challenges such as identifying and importing necessary master data—like product, customer, product cost, units of measure, transaction line items, and currency—and determining the inbound data values needed for analytical dashboards.

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Data Readiness Methodology, click here.

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Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Data Identification, click here.

Expand
titleComplication

  • Identification and importing of all necessary master data:

    • Product

    • Customer

    • Product Cost

    • Units of Measure

    • Transaction/Invoice Line Items

    • Currency

  • Identification of inbound data values required for our analytical dashboards

  • Define and administer security considerations:

    • Identify user permissions required

    • Define out-of-the-box user roles, business roles and business groups

    • Enablement of SSO configuration

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titleBenefit(s)

  • Design and development of an integration plan that migrates required data from customer’s environment into Pricefx flexible data model.

  • Precise separation of required data into data configurations that optimize performance.

  • Establishment of user access and security controls

  • Access to a set of 25 pricing performance benchmarks, delivered in intuitive visual outputs that are designed to answer the most important pricing analytical questions.

  • Access to reliable quantitative benchmarks so they can objectively measure and compare their performance to their industry.

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titleKPIs

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Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Data Quality, click here.

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Data Availability, click here.

Finally, security considerations are also crucial, requiring the identification of user permissions, defining user roles, and enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) for smooth access.

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Features and Capabilities (Overview)

The features and capabilities from this use case can be categorized into these areas:

PLAN

  • Plasma-Executive Summary, consolidates some of the most important KPIs

    • Plasma-Comparison Waterfall, visual representation that allows the display of two sets of data, namely KPI Data and Company Data, side by side.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Accounts with Negative Margin, KPI showcasing three separate bars on the X-axis representing the bottom quartile, median, and upper quartile.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Transactions with Negative Margin, KPI specifically focusing on the percentage of transactions with a negative margin.

    • Plasma-TTM per Unit Realized Price Percent Increase, provides valuable insights into the performance of the company's pricing strategy.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Deals Outside Guidelines, measure the percentage of deals that fall outside guidelines. Deals are considered outside guidelines when the InvoicePrice is less than or equal to the TargetPrice.

    • Plasma-Deal Velocity for Deals Needing Approval, display the average number of days it takes for deals requiring approval to move from creation to approval.

    • Plasma-Average Number of Steps in Approval Process, providing valuable insights into the performance and behavior of customer by displaying the average number of steps a quote goes through during the approval process.

    • Plasma-Company Waterfall, provides ability to analyze company waterfall in aggregate mode or drill-down mode for more detailed analysis.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Products to Reach Revenue Deciles, visualize the percentage of products required to cover a specific percentage of revenue within each decile, presenting a cumulative contribution.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Customers to Reach Revenue Deciles, visualize percentage of customers needed to cover a certain percentage of revenue across different deciles.

    • Plasma-Total Revenue, illustrate the sum of revenue and provide insights into the company's position within the industry.

    • Plasma-Number of Product TTM, displays the number of unique products that have generated some revenue in the period.

    • Plasma-Number of Accounts TTM, umber of unique products that have generated some revenue in the period.

    • Plasma-Number of Sales People TTM, the number of unique people who managed transactions in the period.

PRICE

  • Plasma-Number of List Price Increases per Product, shows average number of times a list price is increased per product and provides valuable insights into how effectively benchmarked companies manage their price increases.

    • Plasma-Number of List Price Changes per Product, displays your place among industry peers in the frequency of changing your prices per product. This allows you to understand to which extent prices are volatile within the industry or to which extent peers are managing their prices.

    • Plasma-TTM per Unit Realized Price Percent Increase, displays the actual average percentage increase of the realized price in the period, enables companies to analyze whether the realized price has increased in the last trailing twelve months.

    • Plasma-Price Increase Realization Waterfall, illustrating the price increase leakage and serves as a benchmarking tool for evaluating the effectiveness of price increases compared to other companies.

PROFIT

  • Plasma-Percentage of Deals Needing Approval, shows the percentage of deals that are required to go through an approval process with the aim to identify opportunities for optimizing processes.

    • Plasma-Number of Deals, displays the number of deals created in the selected period.

    • Plasma-Average Deal Size, display and benchmark the average deal size managed during the specified period in terms of revenue.

    • Plasma-Deal Velocity for All Deals, displays the average number of days that passed between the creation date and the submitted date, enables measuring processes effectiveness compared to the industry’s standards.

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Prescriptive Design Requirements

As a [Pricing Manager/Sales Rep], I want to have basic master data in my system, like product master,

customer master, transaction data, currency data and Product Unit of Measure data. Also I want to have

roles and entitlements, SSO and Plasma set up.

#DEEBFF

Prerequisites for PDR Implementation

The overall design requirements are summarized in these articles:

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titleFunctional and Non-functional Requirements

This use case

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covers all basic inbound data that are needed to implement every use case in the Chemical Industry Catalog. It incorporates the following:

  • Inbound data:

    • Product Master

    • Customer Master

    • Product Unit of Measure

    • Customer Master

    • Transactional Data/Invoice Line Items

    • Currency data

  • Roles and Entitlements

  • Single Sign-On

  • Pricefx Plasma

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Non-Functional Requirements

For this use case, there are no non-functional requirements since it is considered foundational in its support of all other use cases in the Chemical Industry Catalog.

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For the inbound data aspects of this use case there are no calculations that are in scope. However, the required inbound data supporting this use case must be delivered in a format that aligns with project requirements of cleanliness, completeness, accuracy and timeliness.

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NOTE: Pricefx uses the Data Readiness Methodology to identify and prepare customer data for our pricing implementations. Learn more about DRM here.

With those attributes in mind, the inbound data should fulfill these data parameters:

Identification

  • Uniqueness

  • Granularity

  • Consistency

  • Scalability

  • Integration

  • Traceability

  • Flexibility

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Availability

  • Reliability

  • Redundancy

  • Security

  • Integration

Quality

  • Accuracy

  • Completeness

  • Consistency

  • Integrity

  • Timeliness

  • Relevance

  • Accessibility

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Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Data Quality, click here.

  • Availability

    • Reliability

    • Redundancy

    • Security

    • Integration

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LEARN MORE: For more information on Data Availability, click here.

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titleReporting and Dashboards
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User Stories

The following list showcases the user stories associated with this Chemical Use Case:

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titleEpic: Epic: Roles, Entitlements and SSO

As an administrator, I want to define application authentication and authorization abilities via SSO and business roles.

User Story Name - SSO

I want to: Have SSO setup

so I can: Log on seamless without having to enter my user/password

Acceptance Criteria:

  • Pricefx supports SSO using Azure Active Directory, ADFS, Okta and Salesforce 

  • Users can access Pricefx without having to enter a userid/password 

User Story Name - Business Roles 

I want to: Several business roles available 

so I can: Use these in workflows and steer the functionalities these user groups can access 

Acceptance Criteria:

  • In the standard delivery we have the roles Account Exec, Sales Manager, Global Pricing Manager and Pricing Manager available. 

  • These roles can be used to activate certain functionalities in the system. 

  • These roles can be assigned to users 

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titleEpic: Pricefx Plasma

As an Pricing Manager/Pricing Analyst, I want to load the master data needed by this use case.

User Story Name - Transaction waterfall mapping

I want to: Translate (map) my transactional data to the corresponding categories used in Pricefx Plasma transaction waterfall 

so I can: See my transactional data in standardized Pricefx Plasma structure

Acceptance Criteria:  Customer transaction data is mapped to the standardized PricefxPlasma structure in Plasma_TransactionMapping PP table 

User Story Name - Quote Extractor mapping

I want to: Translate (map) my quote data to the corresponding categories used in Plasma_Quotes Data Source 

so I can: See my quoting data in standardized Pricefx Plasma structure

Acceptance Criteria: Customer quoting data is mapped to the standardized PricefxPlasma structure in QuotesDataExtractorMappingConfiguration PP table 

User Story Name - Executive Summary Dashboard

I want to: See Executive Summary Dashboards with predefined KPIs (as per PricefxPlasma documentation) 

so I can: Compare my performance with the provided benchmark and make pricing decisions 

Acceptance Criteria: Customer can see the displayed KPI with benchmark and customer data.

Tip

The charts use either transactional or quote data. In case any of those are missing, Customer will still see the KPI with benchmark results for each chart but not the results representing Customer own data. 

User Story Name - Plan Dashboard

I want to: See Plan Dashboards with predefined KPIs (as per Pricefx Plasma documentation) 

so I can: Compare my transaction related performance with the provided benchmark and make pricing decisions 

Acceptance Criteria: Customer can see the displayed KPI with benchmark and customer transactional data.

Warning

NOTE: If customers do not have transactional data, the KPI benchmark results will be still visible for this dashboard but without the result representing Customer own data. 

User Story Name - Price Dashboard

I want to: See Price Dashboards with predefined KPIs (as per Pricefx Plasma documentation) 

so I can: Compare my transaction related performance with the provided benchmark and make pricing decisions 

Acceptance Criteria: Customer can see the displayed KPI with benchmark and customer transactional data.

Warning

NOTE: If customers do not have transactional data, the KPI benchmark results will be still visible for this dashboard but without the result representing Customer own data. 

User Story Name - Profit Dashboard 

I want to: See Profit Dashboards with predefined KPIs (as per Pricefx Plasma documentation) 

so I can: Compare my quote performance with the provided benchmark and make pricing decisions 

Acceptance Criteria: Customer can see the displayed KPI with benchmark and customer quote data.

Warning

NOTE: If customers do not have Quote Configurator and quote data, the KPI benchmark results will be still visible for this dashboard but without the result representing Customer own data. 

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Data Requirements

As stated in this case.

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This use case has no reports or dashboards that are build directly with the exception of those dashboards that are implemented as part of the Pricefx Plasma implementation and these are separated into Plan, Price and Profit categories.

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Plasma dashboards, click here.

Tip

NOTE: Commonly asked questions on Pricefx Plasma about data confidentiality and sharing can be found here.

  • PLAN

    • Plasma-Executive Summary, consolidates some of the most important KPIs

    • Plasma-Comparison Waterfall, visual representation that allows the display of two sets of data, namely KPI Data and Company Data, side by side.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Accounts with Negative Margin, KPI showcasing three separate bars on the X-axis representing the bottom quartile, median, and upper quartile.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Transactions with Negative Margin, KPI specifically focusing on the percentage of transactions with a negative margin.

    • Plasma-TTM per Unit Realized Price Percent Increase, provides valuable insights into the performance of the company's pricing strategy.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Deals Outside Guidelines, measure the percentage of deals that fall outside guidelines. Deals are considered outside guidelines when the InvoicePrice is less than or equal to the TargetPrice.

    • Plasma-Deal Velocity for Deals Needing Approval, display the average number of days it takes for deals requiring approval to move from creation to approval.

    • Plasma-Average Number of Steps in Approval Process, providing valuable insights into the performance and behavior of customer by displaying the average number of steps a quote goes through during the approval process.

    • Plasma-Company Waterfall, provides ability to analyze company waterfall in aggregate mode or drill-down mode for more detailed analysis.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Products to Reach Revenue Deciles, visualize the percentage of products required to cover a specific percentage of revenue within each decile, presenting a cumulative contribution.

    • Plasma-Percentage of Customers to Reach Revenue Deciles, visualize percentage of customers needed to cover a certain percentage of revenue across different deciles.

    • Plasma-Total Revenue, illustrate the sum of revenue and provide insights into the company's position within the industry.

    • Plasma-Number of Product TTM, displays the number of unique products that have generated some revenue in the period.

    • Plasma-Number of Accounts TTM, umber of unique products that have generated some revenue in the period.

    • Plasma-Number of Sales People TTM, the number of unique people who managed transactions in the period.

  • PRICE

    • Plasma-Number of List Price Increases per Product, shows average number of times a list price is increased per product and provides valuable insights into how effectively benchmarked companies manage their price increases.

    • Plasma-Number of List Price Changes per Product, displays your place among industry peers in the frequency of changing your prices per product. This allows you to understand to which extent prices are volatile within the industry or to which extent peers are managing their prices.

    • Plasma-TTM per Unit Realized Price Percent Increase, displays the actual average percentage increase of the realized price in the period, enables companies to analyze whether the realized price has increased in the last trailing twelve months.

    • Plasma-Price Increase Realization Waterfall, illustrating the price increase leakage and serves as a benchmarking tool for evaluating the effectiveness of price increases compared to other companies.

  • PROFIT

    • Plasms-Percentage of Deals Needing Approval, shows the percentage of deals that are required to go through an approval process with the aim to identify opportunities for optimizing processes.

    • Plasma-Number of Deals, displays the number of deals created in the selected period.

    • Plasma-Average Deal Size, display and benchmark the average deal size managed during the specified period in terms of revenue.

    • Plasma-Deal Velocity for All Deals, displays the average number of days that passed between the creation date and the submitted date, enables measuring processes effectiveness compared to the industry’s standards.

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titleScope Validation and Project Readiness

During scope validation process we are ensuring that the project deliverables are completed according to the agreed scope and quality standard by asking the following questions:

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Scope Validation and Project Readiness Workshop – Validation Questions & Answers:

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Q1: Do you have alternative units of measure for your products that you price? 

A1: 

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Q2: For sales analysis, are there any regional attributes to consider when benchmarking prices? (e.g., sales region, channel) 

A2:

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Q3: Is you the pricing relevant customer hierarchy move than two levels deep? 

A3: 

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Q4: Can one customer id be present in multiple sales organization with different data like payment terms or currencies? 

A4:

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Q5: Waterfall setup; how should your pricing waterfall look like? 

A5:

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on scope validation and project readiness, click here.

Limitations and Risks

exclamation point.pngImage Added

 

Dependence on accurate data

The effectiveness of analytical dashboards and performance benchmarks relies heavily on the accuracy and completeness of the imported master data. Inaccurate data could lead to misleading insights and poor decision-making.

Ongoing maintenance

Continuous updates and maintenance of the system and data may be required to ensure optimal performance

Performance metrics reliability

The reliability of comparison metrics may be affected if industry standards change or if the benchmarks provided do not align with the specific context of the business or if there are not enough participants in the metric aggregation.

Tip

Good to know: A minimum of 5 participants in the anonimization and aggregation process in Plasma is required to ensure security and relevance.

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Out of Scope

This represents the out-of-scope business functions and features for this use case. They can be configured, but by default they are not included in the Chemical Industry Catalog.

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Reporting and Dashboards

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beyond Pricefx Plasma

These can be added upon agreement but are not considered for this particular use case and are subject to additional effort.

Notifications and alerts 

Can be configured but are out of scope for this use case.

API method

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Customer-Facing templates 

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Solution Design

The end-to-end solution for this use case can be categorized as follows:

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titleStep 1-Roles & Entitlements

  • Use of out-of-the-box Business role, Business Group and User Role in Pricefx core implementation.

  • Setup user permissions at the Business Role level.

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on roles and entitlements, click here.

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titleStep 2-Single Sign-On

  • Enable the SSO configuration in the SAML setup 

  • Allow admin users to login by using username/password  

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on SSO setup, click here.

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titleStep 3-Pricefx Plasma

  • Deploy Plasma Transaction Processor Package and Plasma Quote Processor Package 

Tip

NOTE: The user entitled to deploy packages to a particular partition in PlatformManager has to have all the available user roles in that partition 

Warning

CAUTION: If the partition has the “Plasma_Audit” CP table already, please truncate it before deploying the packages.  

  • Plasma Harvester Package is only deployed on the Plasma partition, not the client partition. 

  • Plasma Harvester steps are sequenced with a combination of Plasma_Harvester_Sequencer logic, Plasma_Harvester_Sequencer_Reset CalculationFlow and Plasma_Harvester_SequenceControlTable PP table 

  • After the selected packages are deployed, the following configuration needs to be taken care of: 

    • Plasma Transaction Processor Package Configuration 

    • Plasma Quote Processor Package Configuration 

    • Plasma Configuration Tables 

    • Plasma General Configuration 

    • Plasma KPI Dashboards Configuration 

    • Plasma Deployment Troubleshooting 

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Pricefx Plasma and its deployment, click here.

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titleStep 4-Pricefx Master Data

  • Product Master

    • Product master must have the Id as the key 

    • Product master will be in CSV format 

    • Product master will be put into an agreed shared SFTP folder 

  • Product Cost Data

    • Create a Product Extension for the Product cost 

    • Product cost will be in CSV format 

    • Product cost will be put into an agreed shared SFTP folder 

  • Product Unit of Measure

    • Use system uom datasource for holding the Alternative Product UOM 

    • The Product Unit of Measure table will have the product ID and the alternative UoM as the key 

    • Product UOM will be in CSV format 

    • Product UOM will be put into an agreed shared SFTP folder 

  • Customer Master

    • Customer master must have the Id as the key 

    • Customer master will be in CSV format 

    • Customer master will be put into an agreed shared SFTP folder 

  • Transactional data/Invoice line items

    • Create a datasource for Transactional data 

    • Create a Datamart that uses the Transactional data source, Product Datasource, Customer Datasource 

    • Transactional data will be in CSV format 

    • Transactional data will be put into an agreed shared SFTP folder 

  • Currency Data

    • Use system ccy Datasource for holding the currency 

    • The ccy Datasource will contain daily exchanged rate 

    • Currency will be in CSV format 

    • Currency will be put into an agreed shared SFTP folder 

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titleStep 5-Input Data

The following tables can be either manually loaded in Pricefx using the Excel Client utility or can be automatically integrated using CSV files in a Pricefx dedicated SFTP folder: 

  • Price Waterfall data (typically based in invoice line items) 

  • Product Master 

  • Customer Master 

  • Product Cost data 

  • Currency data 

  • Unit of Measure 

Info

LEARN MORE: For more information on Excel Client, click here.

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integration

Any additional data transformations or integrations required to make data available needs to be considered as an additional configuration effort. 

Customer-facing templates

Out of scope for this solution implementation. 

Terms and Definitions

Info

For common terms → Business User Glossary here and Developers here.

DRM →

 

Data Readiness Methodology (DRM) is a structured approach that organizations follow to prepare their data for effective use in various initiatives, such as data integration, analytics, and decision-making. It involves a series of steps and processes aimed at assessing, improving, and leveraging the quality, availability, and usability of data.