In today’s ever-evolving digital business landscape, data isn't just an asset. It’s the foundation for strategic decisions, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage. From customer intelligence to supply chain optimization and regulatory compliance, quality data fuels it all.
But here’s the catch.
Poor data quality costs businesses millions in errors, delays, and missed opportunities. To get ahead, organizations must adopt a robust Data Quality Management (DQM) solution. However, with a growing number of tools and platforms available, how do you choose the one that’s right for your business?
Let’s break it down.
1.Understand Your Business Needs First
First things first. Before you explore tools, ask:
✦ What types of data do we manage? (Customer, supplier, product, asset, material, etc.)
✦ Are we operating in a single system like SAP, or across multiple platforms?
✦ What are our current pain points? (Duplicates? Inconsistencies? Compliance issues?)
✦ Are we preparing for a major initiative like SAP S/4HANA migration, M&A, or digital transformation?
Clearly defining your goals will help align your needs with the right capabilities.
2.Core Features to Look For in a Modern DQM Solution
The best data quality solutions in 2025 go beyond basic cleanup and should offer the following:
Category: Data Assessment / Data Discovery
Purpose: These are the initial steps to understand the data's structure, quality, and patterns before any action is taken. That means real-time identification of patterns, errors, and anomalies across structured and unstructured data.
Category: Data Organization/Master Data Management
Purpose: These processes help to organize data for better management, analysis, and reporting.
Category: Data Cleansing / Data Quality Improvement
Purpose: Standardization ensures that data is consistent in format across datasets.
Category: Data Quality Improvement / Data Integrity
Purpose: These processes directly focus on improving the quality and integrity of the data, ensuring that it’s clean, free of duplicates, and linked correctly. It is an AI-powered entity resolution to identify duplicates and unify records across systems without manual intervention.
Category: Data Enhancement
Purpose: Enrichment enhances the data by adding external information. So, this process involves integration with trusted external data sources for enrichment and verification.
Category: Data Quality Assurance / Compliance
Purpose: These processes ensure that data adheres to both external standards (compliance with regulations) and internal business rules (logical validation). That means your platform should support ISO and industry taxonomies (like UNSPSC), and integrate with external reference data for validation.
3.Real-Time Integration with Core Systems
The data quality tool you adopt must be integrated especially with SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, and GCP.
PiLog supports real-time integration with SAP (including S/4HANA and BTP), ensuring cleansed and governed data flows directly into your operational systems.
4.Embedded Data Governance Workflows
Quality shouldn’t be an afterthought. Look for role-based approvals, audit trails, version control, and change request management to ensure accountability and trust over time.
5.Dashboards and Reporting
The tool you choose must offer a clear visualization of data quality KPIs, trends, and compliance metrics.
6.Support for Industry Standards & Taxonomies
Ensure alignment with industry-specific standards, taxonomies, and compliance requirements. These are especially vital for regulated and asset-intensive sectors such as Oil & Gas, Aerospace & Defense, Utilities, and Pharma.
Avail PiLog’s iContent Foundry, a rich, curated, and ever-evolving content repository, to accelerate the standardization and classification of materials, assets, and services. With built-in support for global standards like ISO, UNSPSC, eCl@ss, and ECCMA, iContent Foundry ensures your data is structured, searchable, and compliant from day one.
7.AI & ML Are Game-Changers
In 2025, leading DQM platforms are harnessing AI/ML for:
✦ Predictive data quality scoring
✦ Smart matching of supplier/product/customer records
✦ Intelligent recommendation of attributes or classifications
✦ Proactive anomaly detection
While AI can drastically improve accuracy and efficiency, it should be transparent, explainable, and controllable. Choose solutions that give your team visibility into how decisions are made. PiLog leverages AI to streamline classification, enrichment, and anomaly detection, making data quality smarter and scalable.
8.Security, Scalability & Compliance Matter More Than Ever
Data quality touches sensitive areas. Your solution must:
✦ Support data encryption at rest and in transit
✦ Offer role-based access controls
✦ Comply with GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 8000, and other regulatory standards
✦ Scale across global entities without performance trade-offs
PiLog’s Data Quality is GDPR-compliant, scalable across cloud and on-premise environments, and built for high performance in enterprise-scale deployments.
9.Evaluate Vendor Expertise and Industry Fit
Don’t just buy software. Choose a partner. Look for:
✦ Proven success in your industry
✦ Experience with your core platforms (e.g., SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Cloud, etc.)
✦ Strong implementation support and post-go-live services
✦ A roadmap that includes innovation (e.g., GenAI, data fabric, metadata automation)
PiLog is a certified SAP Endorsed App (MDRM) and has helped global enterprises optimize master data, accelerate digital transformation, and reduce procurement spend through better data.
10.Ask the Right Questions During Evaluation
✦ Can the platform handle our volume and complexity of data?
✦ How quickly can we see results (time-to-value)?
✦ What do implementation, onboarding, and support look like?
✦ Is there a sandbox or trial environment?
✦ How flexible are the data models and business rules?
11.Think Long-Term: DQM as Part of Your Data Management Strategy
Last but not least, don’t treat data quality as a one-off project. The best solutions are part of a larger Data Governance and Master Data Management (MDM) strategy that includes:
✦ Continuous monitoring
✦ Self-service data stewardship tools
✦ Collaboration between business and IT
✦ Integration into broader digital initiatives (e.g., AI, analytics, automation)
Choosing the right Data Quality Management solution is a strategic decision. It impacts not only IT but every department that relies on data to make smart decisions. The best solution will align with your business goals, grow with your needs, and empower your teams with clean, trusted, and actionable data. So, look for a tool that’s built for your data, your systems, and your future.
Want the same results PiLog delivers for global leaders?
Talk to us about how our award-winning DQM can help your business eliminate duplicates, standardize data, reduce procurement spend, and get SAP-ready with confidence.
Contact us today to schedule a free data quality assessment or personalized demo.
