Business-Ready Data Every Day™

The Need for Data Governance in SAP Environments

SAP® is a fully integrated ERP system. It can handle almost any commercial business transaction and can do so with great flexibility, supporting many different business process models. However, the range and flexibility of SAP functionality requires a complicated master data model.

• There are over 50 screens in SAP to create a single finished good that is manufactured in a single location.
• In a typical company there may be eleven or more organizational roles involved in defining the different elements of material master data.
• Different kinds of material types and usages need different data - the data for a finished product are different than the data for an MRO material; the data for a manufactured product is different than the data for a purchased product.
• SAP organizes its customer master data over eight different account groups and four different content views.
• To make customer masters function properly, users are required to specify partnering relationships among customer addresses – e.g. when product is shipped to address A, the invoice should be sent to address B.

It is little wonder that after their SAP project implementations, many companies struggle to maintain their master data with sufficient accuracy and completeness to make SAP work properly. As companies add new materials, customers and vendors, critical master data elements may not be updated or they may be updated incorrectly. This incorrect or missing master data results in business transaction interruptions – the inability to create production entries, the inability to ship product, the inability to invoice customers. Such interruptions are expensive, time-consuming and negatively impact your ability to achieve the full return on your SAP investment. In some cases master data processing errors can place a company at risk for failure to meet regulatory compliance standards.

To prevent these problems, many of the largest companies in the world have turned to BackOffice Associates® Data Governance solutions and methodology for the ongoing creation and maintenance of their master data. BackOffice Associates delivers flexible, easy to use data governance solutions addressing the most complex data quality issues in SAP. We offer a range of pre-configured, web enabled, SAP certified, complete applications specifically designed to manage SAP master data. These applications ensure that their SAP master data is Business-Ready Data Every Day™.

To learn more about our products, contact us.