Master Data Steward - South Africa at The Coca-Cola Company

This role strategically centralizes specific data entities, ensuring comprehensive data lifecycle management, governance, stewardship, and ownership aligned with best practices across the organisation. The role involves serving as the guardian of the end-to-end process for Master Data Management, executing strategies to create, maintain, and obsolete data in line with lifecycle criteria. It encompasses data cleansing, definitions, standards, documentation, and expert support to functional teams, data quality analysis, risk mitigation, and process improvement. The position resolves data integrity issues, acts as a domain expert for data-related matters, establishes foundational development, and facilitates business process ownership within the master data domain. It drives standardisation, optimisation, innovation, and process changes, fostering a culture of excellence.

The position leads all functional aspects of master data. The leader will exercise leadership accountability with an emphasis on MDM processes and systems, data driven performance (including data quality), customer focus, and strong internal controls. This role interacts regularly with CCBA management and professional service providers, including the external audit team.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Strategically centralize specific data objects, implementing data lifecycle management, governance, stewardship, and ownership principles and best practices across the organization, in alignment with DAMA guidelines.
• Act as the guardian of the end-to-end process and maintenance of MDM, executing the strategy and business processes required for creating, maintaining, and obsoleting data based on lifecycle criteria.
• Develop and maintain frameworks, documentation, communication and implementation of policies, standards and procedures in platforms for the definition, creation, storage and usage of master data elements.
• Establish project processes, standards guidelines, and structures for master data, metadata and configuration data elements as well as data cleansing, data migration and upload activities.
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive data dictionary (including data rules and rulesets for specific data area, as well as data validation) encompassing all data elements used within the organization, ensuring alignment with DAMA (as well as ECCMA & ISO 8000) best practices and standards.
• Establish and enforce data management policies and standards, working closely with stakeholders to ensure adherence and consistency across all data-related activities.
• Serve as the primary knowledge manager, facilitating the creation, documentation, and dissemination of knowledge assets related to data management practices, ensuring accessibility and promoting a culture of data literacy within the organization.
• Develop and maintain a robust data model and taxonomy framework in accordance with MDM guidelines, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and relevance of data structures and classifications.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to analyze and understand business requirements, translating them into effective data models and taxonomies that support data integration, governance, and master data management initiatives.
• Audit governance and control by means of risk framework (such as RACM)
• Act as a key liaison between Centre of Scale and the Business for respective business processes and process optimisation as well as service excellence and KPI delivery.
• Investigating and resolving questions on master data, providing expertise in data workflows and security, coordinating information flow across departments, delivering master data training, monitoring data quality, developing relevant KPIs, supporting master data integrity, overseeing ruleset implementation, addressing escalated data issues, collaborating with Service Desk for classification accuracy.
• Performing quantitative analysis on critical data sets, creating and distributing reports to stakeholders, addressing ad-hoc analytical requests, optimizing information retrieval methods, sourcing essential operational data, ensuring data quality through techniques, contributing to decision-making with reporting solutions, monitoring data quality, and validating validation station data for accuracy and integrity.
• Driving business process standardization, innovation, and optimization; managing service standards and budgets; ensuring standardized ways of working, master data management, and BI within corresponding functions; facilitating seamless process changes; cultivating customer service culture and process excellence; leading process delivery with CoS partnership; collaborating with group leadership for end-to-end process improvement; participating in projects and communities of excellence; and overseeing testing and incident management within their function.

Skills, Experience & Education    
Qualifications:

• A degree in Computer Science / Information Systems
• Appropriate qualification in Master Data Management (preferably endorsed by DAMA), ECCMA (Electronic Commerce Code Management Association), ISO 8000, the Global Standard for Data Quality and Enterprise Master Data standards

Advantageous: Quality Management System (e.g. ISO9000)

Experience:

• 10+ years of relevant business experience in the managing (and operationalising) master data, data quality management rules, data standards, and alerts configuration, exception resolution, master data management principles including implementation, data migration activities etc.
• Experience with managing Service Level Agreement (SLA), Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and performance metrics highly preferred