I had a great time at Sapphire Now + ASUG in Orlando this week; I spent time talking to customers and partners, seeing great product demonstrations, listening to some really interesting presentations, and socializing with old friends and colleagues. I spent a lot of time at the Enterprise Information Management demo pods, and while I was there, I observed something that I thought was very interesting: there was a lot of keen customer interest in our Master Data Governance and Information Steward solutions.
If you are not familiar with these, let me tell you a little about them. Master Data Governance is a solution that allows you to create very strongly governed master data ahead of your various line of business processes. It is a set of applications that covers customer, supplier, financial, and material master data domains. It also allows for the creation of custom domains. It also includes customizable, pre-built workflows to guide strategic creation of your master data centrally, and to distribute that data to SAP and non-SAP subscriber systems after approval. It would really be a waste of time, however, for me to describe the solution, when there is a superb and comprehensive blog by Markus Kuppe that explains it so much better than I ever could (see http://scn.sap.com/community/mdm/master-data-governance/blog/2011/11/10/sap-master-data-governance-i...). After you read this blog you will understand why there was so much customer buzz at Sapphire.
Information Steward is another tool in the SAP Enterprise Information Management portfolio. Consider this: no matter how good the governance process, or how strong the tooling, master data is still entered by fallible humans, and there will be errors - incorrect data, incomplete data, duplicate data - residing in the system. So we ask ourselves, how can we evaluate the quality of our data, how can we express that evaluation to the business users that own the data, and how can we remediate problems within our data? The answer, or at least an answer, is SAP Information Steward.
SAP Information Steward allows you to easily define quality rules for your data, and then run periodic assessments of your data according to these rules. The results of the assessments are presented in easy to understand scorecards which can be leveraged by business (vs. technical) users. Information Steward also includes remediation processes, but since it integrates seamlessly with SAP Master Data Governance and with SAP Business Suite applications, business users are more likely to correct data quality problems in those applications than from within Information Steward itself.
Now, an important takeaway of the foregoing is the tight integration of applications like MDG with Information Steward; but beyond that, there is some even better news. Did you know that SAP offers a Rapid Deployment Solution for Master Data Governance with Information Stewardship?
If you don't know what a Rapid Deployment Solution is, let me quickly explain: SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions allow you to go live quickly and with predictable, fixed costs on SAP solutions by combining:
- SAP Software
- Best Practices content
- Special implementation accelerators
- Fixed cost/fixed scope implementation services delivered by SAP or by certified partners.
By combining these together, RDS allow you to go live on SAP solutions in as little as 8 weeks! SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions cover many solution areas such as CRM, Enterprise Asset Management, HCM, and more. There are several RDS either available now or available soon that cover specific EIM topics such as Data Migration, sentiment analysis in social media, migrating SAP BW to SAP HANA, and so forth. One of these RDS is SAP Master Data Governance with Information Stewardship.
The SAP Rapid Deployment Solution for MDG with Information Stewardship lets you quickly deploy these solutions in tandem, and provides the implementation accelerators, knowledge transfer, content, and help you need to quickly build your Master Data Governance solution. The service includes:
- SAP software, SAP predefined services, pre-configured content and enablement content at an affordable price with the flexibility for future extension
- Predefined Information Steward content for profiling and assessing the quality of SAP ERP customer, supplier and material data (e.g. table views and validation rules), and continuous monitoring and integration with SAP MDG processes to remediate data issues
- Governed process to fix master data inconsistencies. The predefined process is based on SAP Master Data Governance and includes preconfigured roles, tasks, and user interface
If you have a login to the SAP service marketplace, you can find out more by going to http://service.sap.com/rds-mdg. If you have issues with master data quality in your organization, or if you are interested in implementing a strongly governed process for insuring the quality of your master data, I strongly urge you to look into this solution. High quality data is the backbone of your organization's business processes; find out how quickly you can be on the road to strong data governance and high data quality by leveraging the SAP Rapid Deployment Solution for Master Data Governance with Information Stewardship.
