"This paper is part of a course at the University of Applied Sciences ‘Hochschule Mainz’. The course ‘IT Management & Research’ is a course given by Professor Dr. Gunter Piller and is part of the compulsory courses of the master study ‘IT Management’. The task given as part of the course is to analyse a design-science project taking the guidelines provided by Hevner, Maroh, Park and Ram in their article ‘Design Science in Information Systems Research’ from 2004. The article ‘Design Science in Information Systems Research’ first provides a clear differentiation between design-science and behavioral science. According to Hevner et al. the behavioral science aims at verifying as well as developing theories that explain and anticipate human and organizational behavior. The design-science in contrast to that creates new and innovative artifacts, developing human and organizational capabilities. Hevner et al. focus on design-science and aim at explaining the design-science process by providing seven guidelines for design-science. These are design as an artifact, problem relevance, design evaluation, research contributions, research rigor, design as a search process and communication of research. These guidelines will be further explained and will be used as a basis for the analysis of the design-science project ‘Toward a functional reference model for master data quality management’ by Otto, Hüner and Östele in this paper. The design-science project was chosen, as data has become more and more important nowadays and is the world’s most valuable resource (The Economist, 2017). In addition the authors of the design-science project state, that their project follows the principles of Hevner et al. (Otto et al., 2011). Moreover, the course coordinator and lecturer gave the requirement that the article should be from a journal with a rating of A to D. The design-science project of Otto et al. was published in the journal “Information Systems and e-Business Management”, which is a journal rated with a Caccording to the association of teachers at university of applied sciences for business (Verband der Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft e.V.) (VHB, 2019). The design-science project ‘Toward a functional reference model for master data quality management’ will be summarized in the following paragraph."