About the company
KCC Malls is a leading retail organization in the Philippines. Operating supermarkets, department stores, cinemas, specialty retail, wholesale, and a fast-growing ecommerce business, the company serves millions of customers daily. With more than 20,000 employees and thousands of suppliers, reliable data underpins nearly every commercial and operational decision.
Challenges
Growth created a fractured data landscape
KCC's growth journey is a success story. What began as a family-owned operation evolved into a leading retail organization, supported by experienced teams and deep institutional knowledge.
As the business expanded across new stores, product lines, and sales channels, managing data became increasingly complex. Teams developed local processes, reports, and spreadsheets to meet immediate business needs, creating multiple parallel ways of managing information across the organization.
Core systems were also expected to support a broader range of operations. Data existed in multiple locations, with varying definitions and formats, making alignment across departments increasingly difficult. Even answering a basic question, such as the number of active products, could produce different results.
As confidence in reporting declined, business teams spent valuable time validating and reconciling information rather than focusing on analysis, decision-making, and growth initiatives.
"Before we could talk about analytics or AI, we had to fix the basics. If you don't trust the data, nothing built on top of it will work."
Tamas Fogarasi, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, KCC Malls
No shared framework to govern growth
As KCC continued to grow, business teams frequently turned to IT for new reports, integrations, and data requests. IT responded quickly to support evolving business needs, but priorities often shifted faster than processes and definitions could be aligned.
Over time, different teams developed their own interpretations of key metrics, data definitions, and reporting requirements. While these approaches helped solve immediate challenges, they also introduced inconsistencies across reports, dashboards, and operational processes.
As a result, answering even routine business questions often required significant manual effort and cross-functional reconciliation. Without a shared framework for managing and governing data, scaling analytics, automation, and future digital initiatives became increasingly difficult.
KCC recognized the need for a more structured approach that would provide consistency, improve trust in enterprise information, and establish a stronger foundation for future growth.
Key data challenges KCC Malls faced
- Fragmented data spread across systems, teams, and processes
- Multiple manual workarounds and disconnected reporting methods
- Inconsistent data definitions and business rules
- Limited trust in reporting and analytics
- Significant effort spent validating and reconciling information
- Challenges scaling analytics, automation, and AI initiatives
The solution
Building a business-led data governance model
Recognizing that technology alone would not solve its data challenges, KCC stepped back to rethink how data was managed across the organization. The company concluded that data ownership needed to shift closer to the business, with IT acting as an enabler rather than the primary decision maker.
Business leaders worked together to establish common definitions, align on priorities, and identify measurable outcomes. Instead of addressing requests individually, teams adopted a more coordinated approach that improved visibility, reduced competing priorities, and strengthened collaboration between business and IT.
This shift created a clearer framework for decision-making and accountability, laying the foundation for a more scalable approach to data management.
"The turning point was when the business took ownership. Once we agreed on definitions and priorities, IT could focus on enabling solutions rather than firefighting."
Tamas Fogarasi, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, KCC Malls
Driving master data management adoption across the business
KCC recognized that lasting change would depend on people as much as technology. Employees had developed local processes and workarounds to support business objectives, often in response to immediate operational needs. Rather than replacing these practices overnight, KCC focused on understanding what worked and engaging teams in the transformation process.
Training programs and cross-functional collaboration helped employees better understand how data quality influences business outcomes. As awareness grew, a network of data champions emerged across the organization, helping to reinforce new practices and strengthen collaboration between business teams and central data management functions.
Over time, confidence in shared data increased and dependence on manual reconciliation declined. Teams were able to spend less time validating information and more time using trusted data to support decisions and business objectives.
"When people understand how the data connects to their goals, adoption follows naturally. Trust does not come from rules alone. It comes from involvement."
Tamas Fogarasi, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, KCC Malls
How Multidomain MDM supports future growth
What began as an initiative to improve product data has evolved into a broader business transformation. With a stronger data foundation in place, KCC is now expanding its focus to additional domains that support long-term growth and operational excellence.
Supplier data has emerged as a key priority, reflecting the importance of KCC's large supplier network. Location and customer data are also becoming increasingly important as the company continues to expand its footprint across the southern Philippines. Looking further ahead, KCC sees opportunities to apply the same principles to operational and financial data that support its retail, distribution, and ecommerce businesses.
By establishing clear ownership, trusted information, and scalable governance practices, KCC has created a foundation capable of supporting future analytics, automation, and innovation initiatives across the enterprise.
In summary, KCC has realized the following benefits:
- Harmonized master data across domains and systems
- Clear ownership of data, KPIs, and business priorities
- Structured workflows for onboarding, validation, and stewardship
- Improved data quality and consistency
- Enhanced analytics and reporting accuracy
- Reduced dependence on manual workarounds
- Faster and more informed decision-making
- Greater accountability across teams
- Scalable governance to support future initiatives
- Increased confidence in enterprise data
Summary and what's next
The results: Data as a trusted business asset
KCC's growth highlighted the need for a more consistent and scalable approach to managing data. By establishing business ownership, aligning data definitions, and implementing a centralized master data foundation with Stibo Systems, the company transformed data from an operational challenge into a strategic business asset.
Today, KCC benefits from improved data quality, greater accountability, and increased confidence in the information used to support business decisions across the organization. With consistent data definitions, reduced manual reconciliation, and a governed data foundation, KCC is better positioned to support analytics, AI initiatives, and future growth.
What's next: Expanding to additional data domains
With product data governance established, KCC is now extending its focus to additional domains, including supplier, location, financial, and operational data. By applying the same principles of ownership, governance, and data quality across the enterprise, KCC is building a scalable foundation to support future growth, innovation, and business performance.
FAQ’s
Why is business ownership important for master data management?
Business ownership ensures that the people who use data every day are responsible for defining, maintaining, and governing it. At KCC Malls, shifting data ownership from IT to the business improved accountability, created consistent data definitions, and increased trust in enterprise data. IT could then focus on enabling technologies rather than resolving ongoing data issues.
How does master data management improve decision-making in retail?
Multidomain master data management provides a single, trusted view of products, suppliers, and other critical business data. For KCC Malls, this reduced manual reconciliation, improved reporting accuracy, and enabled faster, more informed decisions across retail, distribution, and ecommerce operations.
Why is trusted data essential for analytics and AI?
Analytics and AI depend on accurate, consistent, and well-governed data. Before improving its data foundation, KCC Malls struggled with inconsistent reports and conflicting business metrics. By improving data quality, establishing common definitions, and strengthening governance, the company created a reliable foundation for future analytics, automation, and AI initiatives.
How can retailers build a scalable data governance strategy?
A scalable data governance strategy combines clear business ownership, standardized data definitions, structured workflows, and cross-functional collaboration. KCC Malls established governance practices that improved transparency, reduced manual effort, and laid the foundation to expand beyond product data into supplier, customer, location, financial, and operational data as the business grows.
