SAP Master Data


SAP Master Data – Foundation of Data Analytics

Nobody notices a home’s foundation. A good home foundation will not make its presence known, whereas a poor foundation will manifest itself in continued problems – in cracks in walls, uneven floors, doors that won’t shut, gaps in windows, and so on!

Master data is very much like the home foundation. Nobody notices master data when it is good. When it is poor, it shows up in every business process – painfully! Every employee, customer, and vendor feel the pain of not having company-wide, reliable, well-maintained, easily updated, secure and compliant master data.

SAP Master Data – Foundation of Data Analytics

Nobody notices a home’s foundation. A good home foundation will not make its presence known, whereas a poor foundation will manifest itself in continued problems – in cracks in walls, uneven floors, doors that won’t shut, gaps in windows, and so on!

Master data is very much like the home foundation. Nobody notices master data when it is good. When it is poor, it shows up in every business process – painfully! Every employee, customer, and vendor feel the pain of not having company-wide, reliable, well-maintained, easily updated, secure and compliant master data.

In an era where data analytics drives the revenue bus for all companies, a reliable single source of truth of company data is mandatory. Without this foundational truth, all analytics are garbage-in, garbage-out leading to sub-standard decisions and immense amount of frustration.

There are several huge advantages in having reliable and comprehensive master data in all the relevant domains – vendor, customer, materials/products, employee, etc.

  1. Efficient business processes
  2. Reduced time to market
  3. Faster and better data analytics
  4. Better compliance
  5. Reduced workload

Yet, SAP master data has become a highly challenging asset to maintain for many reasons – a SAP+third-party applications model, legacy applications, global footprint, compliance constraints, and finally, the increasing multi-cloud, hybrid deployment models.

Once upon a time, SAP was a monolith in many companies, and it was possible to maintain one-source for master data. However, with the proliferation of solutions around SAP, master data is strewn across the company within SAP and non-SAP systems. With complex business processes and supply chains that cut across internal and even vendor, partner or customer systems, master data becomes very difficult to maintain and govern. Vendors such as Laidon solve this with a low-code, prebuilt master data governance solution on the cloud. SimpleMDG’s streamlined user interface retrieves real-time ERP master data and initiates maintenance requests for all CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) processes.

Companies with legacy systems also struggle to migrate their old master data to new systems – the complexity, the costs and the business risks pose difficult hurdles.

Some significant problems in today’s master data involve duplication – lack of proper tools to validate and prevent duplications, lack of well-defined, unique ids and disparate systems make it very easy to generate duplications. Vendors such as Winshuttle enable automation to solve duplication challenges.

Compliance and security are additional complexities today with cloud-based data stores, especially with compliance requirements on who can access personal customer data, where it can be stored and how it should be archived. Governance is the key as this article outlines.

SAP’s own MDM solution with its governance module also continues to provide robust functionality.

 

6 results

  1. financial performance

    Material Master Solution helps American Supplier and Manufacturer Scale Its Business

    Reading time: 1 min

    Business growth demanded an automated solution for SAP Material Master adjustments that would ensure data integrity, business rule compliance, visibility into the process, and eliminate manual data entry. The solution(s) also needed to be scalable to support an aggressive growth plan imposed by upper management. The company was utilizing a complex Excel-based form (template) in…
  2. Master Data Automation

    Webinar On-Demand: How to Build Master Data Automation in SAP ERP

    September 21, 2022

    Most organizations find it increasingly difficult to consistently manage common data sets across diverse operations, processes and departments without creating redundant and inconsistent versions of the same data.   Data within SAP ERP, such as the Material Master Data object, is built around a complex data structure thatoffers flexibility within business processes using these data. But…
  3. How to Perform a Master Data Conversion for More Accurate Product Costing and Management Reporting

    Finance professionals at SAP customers can face several challenges to maintain accurate product costing and inventory valuation as their organizations implement SAP S/4HANA. In this session, learn leading practices for performing master data conversion in an SAP S/4HANA implementation, while ensuring that your standard cost rollup and inventory valuation matches that of your legacy system.…
  4. Efficient Data Management in Healthcare Using SAP Master Data Governance

    Reading time: 9 mins

    SAP’s Master Data Governance application provides an integrated data management capability for the creation, maintenance, validation, and distribution of master data across the enterprise. If you already have an SAP ERP system, then adding SAP Master Data Governance accelerates the master data maintenance process, leading to enhanced quality of your master data by leaps and…
  5. Solve the Top 5 Master Data Challenges Through Automation

    Reading time: 3 mins

    How a company's master data is processed can determine the overall success of the business. If left ungoverned or unautomated, companies cannot realize the full potential of their information and risk missing game-changing insights that could launch them ahead of competitors. Read this article to learn how business teams can get the most out of their master data and address the…
  6. Discover the Ease of Using SAP Solution Manager’s Scout IMG Configuration Comparison Functionality

    Reading time: 18 mins

    See how to use Customizing Scout, which is part of SAP Solution Manager’s Customizing Synchronization suite. This functionality enables you to compare functional IMG configuration between two systems. These systems must be connected in Solution Manager and should be configured with the necessary authorizations. It is useful especially when manual activity is involved in a…...…