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.

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.