Maximizing SAP Investment with Prospecta MDO

⇨ Companies should investigate their own data needs thoroughly before overhauling data strategies.

⇨ Prospecta offers its Master Data Online (MDO) solution for master data management that allows companies to enhance their SAP ecosystem’s value.

⇨ When companies move data from ECC into S/4HANA, there is a window to improve the data.

Organizations need to achieve faster deployment and ROI realization from their data management strategies. Information silos and convoluted data management hierarchies can hinder growth. To aid SAP organizations, global software and services company Prospecta offers its Master Data Online (MDO) solution for master data management that allows companies to enhance their SAP ecosystem’s value.

MDO is a scalable, multi-domain, online SaaS platform that is foundational for a successful SAP master data management strategy. With its origins in the heavy assets industries, Prospecta has significant experience with enterprise asset management and plant maintenance data. MDO allows companies to cleanse and enhance their data and deploy business rules on a single platform. Prospecta’s Chief Alliance Officer Scott Barrett highlights how this adds significant value for SAP customers.

“If you go to SAP, you have to buy four different products to do what we can on a single platform, and none of the business rules talk to each other across those products. We offer value-added services for cleaning up that specialized data, like spare parts equipment. We offer content like taxonomies for classification, spend analytics, and millions of records in a spare parts database that you get to bounce the data off when it comes through the system. We offer engineers who can do data cleansing if you can’t do it yourself. We offer outsourced resources to process the data for you in the master data request,” said Barrett.

Building a Business Case

SAP customers have different levels of data maturity. Once data maturity issues are discovered, many customers attempt to overhaul data practices before understanding the severity of the situation including the project size. Such companies should step back and evaluate their data before trying any solution. This not only saves time and effort on the back-end, but also helps workers in data-intensive industries to build a business case for their ideal solution.

“Don’t try to eat the elephant all at once. It’s a one-bite-at-a-time thing. Focus on small wins. With early-stage customers, we do a lot of data health assessments. We find out how complete and consistent your data is. We give you a view of your data and where it is today. And then once you have that and you can socialize it, that gives you a way to show people in the real world, the problems in your data. And then we show them what clean data can look like,” said Barrett.

MDO can be a useful tool for data improvement, as it can investigate and assess data quality by processing multiple records and highlight improvement areas. This is an essential step in building a business case for enhanced data management solutions.

Differentiators

Once the need for master data management solutions is established, SAP customers must search through a crowded landscape to find partners that best suit their needs. This is growing in importance as organizations start to move to SAP S/4HANA. Prospecta’s MDO solution sets itself apart through its industry-specific specialization and the platform’s functionality.

• Specialization: In any given sector, companies often face unique challenges that can be difficult to manage, especially for the inexperienced. Prospecta, with decades of experience working with oil and gas, chemicals, metals and mining, utilities, and manufacturing clients, offers unique insights and core competencies for organizations.
• Integrated SaaS Data Platform – Prospecta’s MDO for SAP is the only integrated SaaS platform that can work with any data on a single cloud platform. Having master data, data quality, and profiling saves companies significant time and effort in their master data strategy. Prospecta’s cloud-native platform and value-added services from dedicated engineers address the data issues plaguing many organizations.

Leveraging Automation

The demand for automation is growing as organizations struggle with data quality and quantity. The 2023 SAPinsider Data Management Strategies Research Report reveals that 44% of respondents have too many data sources, making it the top pain point. The second biggest pain point pertains to poor data quality, highlighted by 43% of respondents.

Data degrades over time – at about 4% per month. Companies need to know that data quality constantly drops and should be managed with regular upkeep. MDO features a data quality engine and metadata management and leverages automation to simplify the master data request process. It can also prepare structured data from various sources using AI and machine learning for S/4HANA transformation to ensure that companies have high-quality data ahead of their migration.

The Move to SAP S/4HANA

As organizations move to SAP S/4HANA, they must carefully consider who they will partner with. Prospecta is an SAP Endorsed Partner, and its MDO for SAP is an SAP Endorsed App. This strengthens the partnership between the two companies and ensures that MDO for SAP offering is specifically tailored for those moving to SAP S/4HANA.

The best time to clean up data is when it is not in a company’s operational system. When companies move data from ECC into S/4HANA, there is a window to improve the data. This is an essential step companies should take to accelerate value realization from their move to SAP S/4HANA. As Barrett suggests, “The last thing you want is to have all these great new interfaces, but the first time you search, it is the same bad data underneath. And it is not something that companies think about when they’re going to S/4HANA, so a big part of our job is educating customers, saying, ‘you should start now, even if S/4 is two years out, you can clean up your data stored in MDO right now, it can connect to ECC, and then you flip a switch and it will migrate it over and load it into S/4HANA.’”

What this means for SAPinsiders

Data management is becoming increasingly vital as SAP customers move to SAP S/4HANA. Most companies need to build a heterogenous data management strategy that incorporates a wide variety of data sources and data types. Prospecta’s MDO can consolidate master data, data quality, data profiling, and more onto a single platform. Its data integration layer leverages SAP’s Business Technology Platform to harmonize all disparate components, allowing companies to transfer data across different systems securely and reliably.