Data governance for the SAP heavy enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Master Data Governance
In 2014 our company decided we needed to modernize our master data governance approach. Part of this included moving to a technology platform that could enable us to implement intelligent automation and very clear global governance. SAP MDG is used throughout the entire company in more than 100 countries and is used for many types of master data objects from finance objects, to suppliers, to customers, and even including materials. Specifically SAP MDG has helped our company standardize our master data workflows thus simplifying our governance model while at the same time automatically catering for local legal differences. It also has enabled us to increase our data quality while at the same time use less resources (both technical as well as business resources). Finally, SAP MDG has enabled us to properly measure our data quality which is an important capability to successfully execute any governance program.
Pros
- SAP MDG is a powerful platform that enables implementation of advance master data automation such as field auto derivation.
- Like SAP ECC, MDG performs very well throughout all sites around the world.
- SAP MDG comes equipped with the standard ECC or S/4Hana data models. This greatly simplifies rollout of the governance platform.
Cons
- As with all powerful and complex information platforms, SAP MDG does have a learning curve to it, especially if you plan on doing advanced things such as implementing MDM automation.
- SAP MDG is capable of replicating data across many platforms (including non-SAP) however, this too, has a learning curve to it and will require some work. Bottom line...it doesn't just happen out of the box!
- SAP MDG's flexibility can also be a weakness as sometimes you just want to implement a standard governance flow without defining everything from scratch. We have found that usually, you will need to define each workflow yourself in order for it to work properly.
- MDG is definitely an investment that takes a few years to recuperate. (If you are looking at pure, direct financial benefits.)
- However, if you look at all the productivity gains in the business due to not having to stop the business constantly because of data issues, the payback period would be substantially shorter.
- In particular, we were able to reduce master data maintenance staffing levels while increasing quality and decreasing workload for business requesters and approvers.
- Not having to worry about data integrity issues has shortened the time to realize benefits for several of our major process change related projects and it has also decreased the risk of these projects running into significant delays (often at the last minute) due to master data being misjudged during the process resdesign.
We consider SAP MDG to be among the top tier master data governance solutions. Within this tier, there are several others that offer comparable products in almost every dimension except in the inclusion of the ECC or S/4HANA data models. For an SAP centric company, this makes a big differentiator.
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