SAP MDM

SAP MDM – Governance as Key to MDM success

In an era where data analytics drives the revenue bus for all companies, a reliable single source of truth of company data is mandatory. Companies recognize the criticality of having reliable and comprehensive master data.

SAP Master Data Governance is a solution built on SAP Business Technology Platform. It pulls together master data organization-wide and manage it centrally to provide a united, trusted view into the business. It comes as a cloud and on-premise version, and supports all master data domains and implementation styles with pre-built data models, business rules, workflows, and user interfaces. As one would expect from any SAP product today, it also connects to a wide variety of SAP and non-SAP software through interfaces. Read this article on the improvements SAP has done in its Master data capabilities – An Introduction to SAP Master Data Governance.

Key elements of the solution include:

1. Centralized creation and maintenance of master data – Companies can ensure governance at the point of authorship and avoid duplication, invalid edits, and non-compliance
2. Automated workflows – Standardized and customizable, these automated workflows ensure the right people audit, approve, and manage the master data at the right time
3. Compliance and audit support – Maintaining version control and change history improves transparency and helps ensure compliance
4. Security and access – Role-based access and device specific setup helps to enforce security and yet, provide the right people with access.

SAP Master Data Governance also comes pre-built with the most common domains for SAP – Customer, Supplier, Material, Financials, Retail, and Technical assets. It also a rich set of domains that customers can implement such as country code, tax code, order type, bank code, currency code, department, channel, activity type, document type, etc.

With SAP Master Data Governance, companies can also implement and manage a federated master data (instead of a centralized one) where different teams own different domains. The central system manages the core while syndicating specific domains to other systems. This model provides flexibility to regional office or product units, while also ensuring central compliance and a single source of truth.

SAP Master Data Governance’s cloud edition goes further by providing a hub-and-spoke federation that can slowly help an organization migrate to a federated approach.

Overall, SAP’s MDM solution meets the goals of data strategy, a critical strength as companies’ data growth explodes.