Question Re: why and when customer needs mdm in Technology Q&A

why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:08:42 GMT

Dear Colleagues,

I am asking basic things about MDM.

what are the main advantages of MDM, why customer has to go for MDM ( i hope we do have BI and PI(process integration) then what is the specialtiy of MDM.

can some one please put more light on it.

sorry even i searched the post but i could not find appropriate one...

please suggest me roughly...

Thanks,

Mahesh.

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:17:43 GMT

Hi Maheshkumar,

MDM is an SAP tool specifically designed to handle and manage master data coming from several sap and non sap systems.

SAP-MDM performs many activities on the master data like:

- Consolidation

- Deduplication

- Data enrichment

- Data Quality

- Data Governance

etc...

I do understand that we have BI and PI systems in the SAP Netweaver platform but each of them are used for different purposes at all.

BI is speciafiaclly for reportinga dn PI is for excahange and data transfer.

SAP-MDM looks specifically into Master data management.

Its like an R/3 system can also be used for reporting but we use BI as BI is designed keeping in mind the reporting needs in detail.

To know more on MDM you can go through the below link:

(new to MDM)

Hope It Helped

Thanks & Regards

Simona Pinto

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:35:45 GMT

any more updates welcome ?

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:54:08 GMT

Hi,

Think of the scenario where the company has acquired many other companies and needs to maintain the consistent data across the systems. Every company has their own naming conventions or method of maintaining data in such cases if you simply merge their databases you may get same data with in different format which is nothing but duplicate of data. Hence to avoid duplication and to make data conisistent across the systems we need MDM. Data from various systems will be brought to MDM (i.e. Central location), identify duplicates, merge them, make data consistent by using validations, enrich the data and send the data to respective systems.

This is just an example

Regards,

Jitesh Talreja

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:01:23 GMT

Hi there

Following are few real time scenarios where MDM is used.

this wil help u understand MDM's usage .

real time scenarios:-

1) What if your company has facilities around the world and you need to perform a global spend analysis? You want to tally global spend by product, by plant, and across business units.

You want to compare vendor prices and performance with industry benchmarks, collaborate with suppliers to improve product yield, and much more. But the information you need –

for example, master data that is error free, harmonized, and reliable – is trapped in various information silos throughout your organization. Your organization lacks the enterprise information infrastructure to carry out such analysis.

2 ) what if you are with a large company that has recently acquired several smaller companies? They are operated as wholly owned subsidiaries. You suspect that several or perhaps all of the companies use the same vendors, and you need to leverage this fact in your purchasing process. But the master data from order processing is either unavailable or not integrated – another lost opportunity.

3) Perhaps you need to know more about your customers, for example, to better align sales territories and distribution channels or package the best cross-sell offer for customers, based on their current relationship with your company. But a heterogeneous

IT landscape makes collecting integrated customer information extremely difficult or, in some cases, simply impossible.

4) large pieces of machinery are a major company asset and you would like information about their cost, depreciation,maintenance, and other key data. But you do not have the

infrastructure in place to efficiently gather, analyze, or use this information.

SAP MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT

Fortunately, there is a solution that goes beyond homegrown solutions, data-cleansing solutions, or the capabilities of enterprise application integration (EAI) software – the SAP Master Data Management (SAP MDM) a key component of the SAP NetWeaver technology platform.

Key advantages :-

SAP MDM allows your organization to aggregate, map, exchange, analyze, and disseminate master data – at a business object level and on a global scale – without disrupting your IT infrastructure.

I guess technical details are provided by others in the above link so i wont go there...

but if u need any more help feel free to ask

Regards,

Roshani

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:14:30 GMT

Hi,

As per the above posts you must have got some ideas like :

MDM provides

Data Governance

Data Enrichment

Deduplication

or as we can say complete data solution for your landscape because it has such a capabilty to provide a uniform or 360 degree data across your system landscape.

probably we can say it also give Central managment of master data (Real time) at a very huge level.

moreover by clubbing BO and other third party tool we can also enhance the quality and other aspects of our Data.

That can also be Add up with BI , PI and provides a big Cross system application which suits for data maintainace of a particular organization.

I hope it helps up to some extents.

Rgds

Deepak

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:10:44 GMT

Hi Mahesh,

Most of the points are already covered in the above.

To give you a simple example.

Suppose there is a Company maintaing any master data. They have duplicates in their master data. Now when they take reports using the BI system, the reports will not be right.

So, in this scenario, if we have a MDM in place, the master data can be cleansed. After that taking the reports using BI will result in correct reports. So, we see in this example BI and MDM complement each other.

XI is again for a complete different purpose. It facilitates file exchange mechanism.

XI is a middleware like many others. It is well suited for connecting SAP systems with each other and with non-SAP. SAP XI provides an integrated workflow engine that allows to define adapters to non-XML-protocols and mappings to convert data content from source to target.

Check these threads to know the purpose of XI:

For example: Suppose we have ECC and MDM system. Now ECC gives the source data in Idoc, which is not understood by MDM. So, the XI playa a role here for converting the source Idoc into a format understood by MDM.

So, all the 3 are for different purposes, and depending on the requirement the customer has to go for them.

Hope it gives you a clear picture.

Thanks,

Priti.

Re: why and when customer needs mdm

Former Member — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:12:42 GMT

thanks