Traditionally, extracting data from SAP systems requires writing complex integration scripts. This process is often costly and time-consuming.
Using SAP MDG, you can leverage standard models to govern master data from the entire SAP landscape. This enables you to create a single version of truth for your business partners, product, and financial data.
Data Governance
It’s essential to establish a governance structure for handling data. This helps to reduce the risks associated with unauthorized access to or loss of information. It also enables businesses to implement policies that meet internal and regulatory standards.
The first step in establishing data governance is to define roles and responsibilities. This includes identifying the owners of data and the custodians who oversee them. Establishing processes for storing, backing up, and protecting data from internal issues or theft is also essential. Establishing a plan for monitoring and reporting on the impact of data governance initiatives is vital.
A solid data governance process can help companies eliminate data shadow systems and centralize data in a warehouse. This will ensure consistency and accuracy in the data, which is essential for any business. It can also help businesses avoid costly mistakes, such as ordering the wrong materials or missing delivery deadlines.
There are many different models for implementing data governance, each with strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, a company should choose a model that aligns with its business goals and culture. Creating a vision and business case for the governance program is crucial to do this. The vision should describe the broad strategic objective, while the business case should specify the people (roles), technologies, and processes that will support it.
Data Quality Management
The most crucial step in any SAP data quality management strategy is to implement a robust set of processes that help to ensure your organization’s master and transactional data is of high quality. These include data cleansing (or scrubbing), identifying and fixing duplicate records, adding missing values to improve data completeness, and monitoring your data through data profiling to detect and correct errors and inconsistencies.
These processes should function correctly even in human error or system failure. This helps to ensure that your most critical business processes can function properly and achieve their promised ROI.
If a critical data process has been at risk or compromised by defective data, it must be re-initiated with new, high-quality data. This will require re-starting any business processes that depend on the defective data. It will also provide an excellent opportunity to review your existing data quality rules to see if they need to be updated or changed.
Data Analytics
Many data quality issues stem from manual data entries. Having systems that detect and prevent these errors is essential. It’s also important to have a system that identifies duplicate entries and suggests merging them when necessary. Having a clean, consistent set of information to work with can help you save time and resources in the long run.
As cross-departmental collaboration and remote work become commonplace, having a quality data solution is becoming increasingly crucial for SAP users. A single source of truth can sort through the different versions of data scattered across departments, the erroneous data from manual entries, and other factors that can cause inaccurate data sets.
Several SAP solutions are available to handle this. For instance, the SAP Data Services software lets you perform checks in real-time on data sets before analyzing, moving, or integrating them. This can help you move toward a single version of the truth, staving off hours of wasted time and rehashed problems caused by bad data.
It provides a lean data management approach that reduces the need for complex SAP application change management while delivering better data management results.
Data Integration
As organizations acquire gigabytes and terabytes of data, they must prepare it for use. This process, called provisioning, involves everything from validating and cleaning data to storing it. SAP offers several solutions to help you with this.
SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) is an ERP solution that helps companies simplify and automate data management across multiple systems. It enables the creation of data groups that can be used for various purposes, including group reporting and analysis. It also includes features like data aging and dynamic tiering, which automatically relocates data from memory to disk when it becomes stale.
MDG can be integrated with SAP HANA to perform various tasks, such as data migration and harmonizing master data from non-SAP systems. It can also be connected to SAP Data Hub, which provides a single access point to all your data. This enables businesses to easily combine and analyze information from different systems, resulting in faster, more effective decisions. It also enables organizations to understand their customer base better and improve their sales and marketing efforts. Additionally, it allows businesses to optimize business processes, such as sales order processing, fulfillment, and cash/working capital management.
