Dynamic content
All the pages published by the 4MDG team that aren't part of the site's fixed sections.
The Tax Reform Readiness Test measures, in a few minutes, whether your company's material and product records are ready for the new fields that IBS and CBS require — reviewed NCM codes, cClassTrib and CST for every item. You answer objective questions and find out where the risk of a rejected invoice or lost tax credit is concentrated.
A material taxonomy is the tree that organises the catalogue into families and defines, for each family, which characteristics describe an item in it. It answers two questions: where this material fits, and what must be filled in for it to be complete.
Material description standardization is the practice of describing every material the same way: same order of characteristics, same unit, same abbreviation, same vocabulary. The description stops being free text and becomes composed of attributes — which makes the material findable, comparable and purchasable without interpretation.
Master data is the registration information that several areas use and that changes rarely: who the customer is, who the supplier is, what the material is, what the service is. It does not record an event — it records the existence of something. That is why an error in it contaminates every transaction that references it.
MDM is the discipline that keeps a single trusted record for every customer, supplier, material and service in the company. It brings registration, quality rules, approval and distribution into one process, so every system reads the same version of the data — not five similar ones.
MDG is the part of MDM that defines and enforces the rules of the record: who may create it, what is mandatory, who approves, what blocks, and what is logged. It turns written policy into system behaviour — the rule stops depending on someone remembering it.
Deduplication is the process of recognising that two or more records describe the same entity and deciding what to do with them: merge, cross-reference, or mark as distinct. The hard part is not deleting a duplicate — it is proving that two similar records are in fact the same one.
A data steward is the person accountable for a data domain: they decide what a valid record is, approve exceptions, measure quality and answer for wrong data. It is not a technology role — it is a business one, because the rules they define are business rules.
An AI assistant answering questions about your master data is only trustworthy if the data is. Before connecting a model to the database, what decides answer quality is what is already there: items described one way, duplication handled, attributes filled in.
NCM is the eight-digit code that classifies goods for tax purposes in Mercosur. It determines the tax rate, tax benefits and reporting obligations — and it depends on what the goods are, not on how they were described. A wrong classification produces wrong tax, in both directions.