SAP’s Master Data Governance: Capability & Benefits

In today’s digital landscape, data is an integral part of a business that pilots it toward a successful tomorrow. From informed decision-making to reliable forecasts, it helps in not one but all business aspects and departments. To collect this data, businesses rely on numerous systems and applications that mainly include ERP, HCM, and CRM.

It is well-acknowledged and known that bad data quality causes bad business decisions. And this is where Master Data Management (MDM)or Master Data Governance (MDG) proves to be the most useful. It allows businesses to make use of the enormous quantity of data and assists each department in doing its duties.

Forrester Research in its ‘The Forrester Wave: Master Data Management Report, Q4 2021″ has listed SAP as the leader in MDM. Forrester titled SAP as the leader among the 14 other vendors based on detailed comparison across a variety of features and user expectations.

What is Master Data Management?
Master Data Management, in a nutshell, is a collection of procedures, instruments, and technologies used to consolidate data regarding key entities that are involved in the commercial activities of your business. It is a tech-enabled business discipline that combines business and IT to guarantee the consistency, correctness, stewardship, governance, and accountability of an enterprise’s official shared master data assets. These entities include:

  • Employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, and partners
  • Products, assets, and attributes
  • Offices, locations, and departments

MDM helps create and maintain a single master record for each person, place, and particular inside a company. It also gives businesses a reliable, up-to-date picture of their most important data, which they can utilize for enhanced reporting, decision-making, and process efficiency.

Why is Master Data Management Important?
Good data quality helps businesses in making good business decisions. Poor data quality, however, not only impacts businesses negatively but also steers them toward business failure. This is why master data management is so critical. It provides businesses with a consolidated view of the scattered data. The other benefits of MDM are:

  • MDM promotes fewer data mistakes and duplicates across several applications.
  • It provides improved and reliable analytics insights for data-driven decisions.
  • MDM guarantees streamlined operations and increased effectiveness.
  • MDM also delivers increased openness and compliance with data privacy and other laws.

Besides all these, MDM provides support for mergers and acquisitions with a simplified procedure for combining and reconciling various data assets.

Forrester Named SAP as the Master Data Management (MDM) Leader

In Q4 2021, Forrester researched, analyzed, and identified the top 15 vendors and named SAP a Leader. Apart from SAP, the report also identified IBM, Ataccama, Profisee, Prospecta Software, Winshuttle, Reltio, Riversand, Informatica, Magnitude Software, TIBCO Software, Viamedici, Semarchy, Stibo Systems, and Syniti. In its 24-criterion evaluation of MDM providers, Forrester showed how each provider measures up and helps enterprise architecture experts choose the best MDM provider for their needs.

Forrester evaluated SAP Master Data Governance Application. Forrester ranked SAP as a leader after conducting a thorough analysis. Adding more to it, the independent research firm offered noteworthy recognition to SAP’s “excellent multi-domain MDM capabilities at scale” and “prebuilt data models, business rules, processes, and user interfaces to enable MDM deployments.” The aforementioned factors were crucial in the report’s analysis of the SAP Master Data Governance.

“SAP Has Good Multidomain MDM Capabilities at Scale” – Forrester Research Inc.

The 24-criterion evaluation report chiefly covered the current offering, strategy, and market presence. In the report, Forrester recognized that SAP provides strong multidomain MDM scaling capabilities. With quality, stewardship, and governance features, SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) enables a multidomain MDM solution for on-premises, private, and public cloud deployment. The solution is also integrated with SAP business products, including SAP HANA, SAP Marketing Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud.

The report states that SAP provides prebuilt data models, business rules, processes, and user interfaces to facilitate MDM implementations. The key components of SAP’s strategy include expanding its cloud services, boosting automation and intelligence, and providing more comprehensive data management solutions. SAP scored well in scalability, security, compliance, and governance.

The Forrester research indicates that reference customers mainly had positive feedback on SAP MDG. One customer stated that the “SAP MDG implementation brought us greater government control and streamlined efficiency,” but some customers had concerns about the solution’s high cost. Overall, SAP is a good fit for companies that support SAP-packaged applications/services.

Forrester’s Expert Evaluation Overview
Forrester evaluated SAP and other vendors against 24 criteria. This was then grouped into three high-level categories. They are as follows:

  1. Current Offering: The first-high category is the current offering. The strength of SAP’s current offering is shown by where it is positioned on the Forrester Wave graph’s vertical axis. The primary criteria for selecting SAP Master Data Governance included matching, linking, and entity resolution. Other criteria included data quality, context, compliance, governance, integration, business templates, deployment, lineage, security, HA/DR, scalability, customer and product 360-degree domains, other domains, and multi-domain support.
  2. Strategy: The position on the horizontal axis represents the potency of SAP’s strategy. Forrester looked at the SAP Master Data Governance’s vision, execution strategy, collaborations, technical support, and professional services.
  3. Market presence: It is represented by the size of the markers on the graphic. The market presence scores provided by Forrester take into account the sales volume and revenue of SAP.

Crucial Takeaways

Dr. Andreas Doehrn, leader of SAP’s Master Data Management Engineering, stated that success in today’s digital economy depends on accurate, complete, and timely data views. “SAP Master Data Governance streamlines and centrally manages the master data lifecycle, enhancing the quality and consistency of information. SAP considers Forrester’s designation of SAP as a Leader in this review to be evidence of its value to its clients and the strength of its data solutions.

By combining SAP and outside data sources and processing extra bulk updates on massive data, SAP Master Data Governance provides enterprises the ability to establish a single source of truth. Clients can then create a unified and integrated master data management strategy across domains to streamline enterprise data management, improve data accuracy, and lower the total cost of ownership.

If you are interested in managing master data across your organization, call us and we will help you set your master data governance on the right path with SAP’s MDG.

Call Chitrabala to know more on +91-97514-35022 or drop a mail on chitrabala@techatalyst.com

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