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February 27^th, 2023  |  4 min read

Data diaries:
Fredrik Kestran, Svevia

We sat down with Fredrik, the Team Lead for Data & Integration Development at Svevia, to discuss all things Master Data Management and beyond. 

Fredrik’s strong background in master data has seen him solve data challenges in the biggest bank in the Nordics as well as Sweden’s largest construction company. 

Today, he leads Svevia’s efforts to provide Svevia with a steady stream of operational data in a modern, safe and reliable way.

In this interview, Fredrik shares his experiences, lessons learned as a data leader, and views on how effective master data management will support companies in becoming greener.

Help is more available than you think it is. Your data issues aren’t unique – many others struggle with the exact same problems. We spoke to peers in and outside of our industry and found no shortage of advice.

The best advice we received was to focus on one object or instance at a time. That focuses the implementation journey of a data project and makes it easy to see things through to the end. It also makes it easier to show the business value – you complete tasks faster, turn business stakeholders into project advocates and that momentum makes it easier to scale things up.

Before CluedIn, we had three separate systems that were creating and managing employee data. They didn’t speak to each other, but many downstream systems consume employee data from these different programmes and it caused problems.

Our goal was to centralize that data in CluedIn, place an API on top of it, and give all systems – future and existing – one place to go for clean, accurate and enriched employee data.

One unexpected benefit of our work was that it made our data transparent in a way it never had been before – both in terms of quality, and also the impact that missing data had on other business tools/functions. That showed us how we could iterate, get more value from our data, and help our colleagues work even more effectively.

 
One of our most important tasks was to show the business why data needed to be centralized. There was resistance at first – people argued that the data existed in systems already, and didn’t understand why it needed to be sent somewhere else (CluedIn). Now they see the difference it makes, and we have turned stakeholders into advocates.

Master Data Management will support our ESG ambitions by helping us to understand Scope 3 emissions. Take fuel – our partners all use different names to describe essentially the same fuel. By using CluedIn to standardize these different names/types, we’ll be better equipped to measure our downstream carbon footprint and continue our sustainability journey with a stronger understanding of where we are today.

My advice to other data leaders is not to get too hung up on perfecting data or systems before you let the business get their hands on them. Instead, deliver fast and iterate.

Sometimes that means making the data available before it’s absolutely perfect, but that’s okay. It’s more important to get the data out to the business fast so people can quickly see the value of data. That starts with a system that lets you bring data into a management platform and back out to the business as fast as possible.

Our full conversation with Fredrik contained even more insights. Luckily for you, we recorded it and made it available to watch on demand here.