MDM to the Rescue for Complex SAP Landscapes

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

Everyone associated with the world of SAP technology has heard about NetWeaver and the new framework for SAP applications known as Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA). If you’re one of the “enterprising” few, you may have even deployed aspects of NetWeaver or delved into the exciting world of ESA. Over the course of the next few issues, we will explore the less-familiar aspects of the new SAP technology stack. We begin this week with Master Data Management (MDM)..

Most SAP customers are intimately familiar with Master Data. After all, it’s a core component of any SAP implementation. When working with Master Data, great care is taken to define Customers, Vendors, Employees, Materials, etc. Exhaustive lists of Master Data items are collected and painstakingly cleansed. Mock conversions and production conversions are performed in order to establish a baseline set of Master Data. Once in maintenance mode, attempts are made to keep the Master Data synchronized with the dynamic, real-world organization SAP’s Master Data is meant to model.

For some SAP customers, Master Data is a fairly straightforward thing. There are plenty of SAP customers with a single instance or a small number of legacy systems, and a few hundred or a few thousand items in each Master Data category. MDM is no sweat for these customers. New Master Data items get added, updated or deleted on a regular basis. Staying in sync with business reality is not that big of a deal when dealing with these relatively small orders of Master Data magnitude.

But SAP’s customer base includes the biggest of the big. Many customers deal with mind-numbing complexity behind the scenes. They must synchronize with a large number of legacy systems, each of which has some need for Master Data - and its own format and business rules for how Master Data is defined and used. Add to this an SAP landscape that might contain several if not dozens of SAP systems, and the Master Data challenge begins to come into focus. Just imagine what has to be done in such an environment to change a Customer in one system, then synchronize every other system that touches that Customer. For complex landscapes, the costs associated with this single Customer change can be quite significant.

Master Data Management (MDM) is SAP’s answer to this formidable challenge. MDM allows customers with complex landscapes to begin to tackle the issue in an orderly, automated way. In the process, MDM enforces best practices for how to define, add, update, or delete Master Data in a complex environment. Most importantly, MDM affords a structured methodology for propagating changes throughout an IT landscape. In classic fashion, SAP has honed in on a specific problem that plagues most large, complex customers and engineered a solution that automates and optimizes a mundane but potentially expensive business and IT process. MDM will be a huge success within the SAP installed base because it represents clear value - the kind that comes along with real, demonstrable ROI.