Product Overview: SAP Master Data Governance (MDG)
SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) is a comprehensive solution designed to help organizations manage, govern, and maintain the quality and consistency of their master data across the entire enterprise. This platform is crucial for ensuring that critical business data, such as customer, product, and financial information, is accurate, consistent, and compliant with governance policies.
Key Functionality
Central Governance
SAP MDG enables businesses to create and maintain master data in a central system, adhering to predefined data rules and standards. This central governance approach ensures that master data is consistent, non-redundant, and of high quality from the point of creation or changes. The maintained master data is then replicated to satellite systems, ensuring harmonized data across the organization.
Master Data Consolidation
MDG facilitates the consolidation of master data from various sources, including cloud and on-premises systems, to eliminate data silos. It automatically identifies and merges duplicate records, providing a unified view of the data. This process involves loading data from multiple sources, consolidating duplicate and potential duplicate records into match groups, and allowing for manual or automated approval and resolution of these groups.
Data Quality Management
SAP MDG includes robust data quality management functions to ensure the accuracy and completeness of master data. It allows for data cleansing to remove inconsistencies, errors, and outdated data. Additionally, it enables the enrichment of master data with external sources and validates data against predefined business rules to maintain high data quality. The system can also use machine learning to analyze historical data and derive better quality data.
Workflow and Approval Processes
MDG provides a flexible, business-driven workflow and workflow rules framework to automate master data management processes. This includes configurable approval workflows tailored to an organization’s specific needs, ensuring that data creation and changes are reviewed and approved by the appropriate stakeholders before being finalized in the system.
Integration and Customization
The platform offers tight integration with the SAP data model, reducing the total cost of implementation by reusing data validation and mapping logic. It also provides frameworks to configure custom master data objects and extend standard master data objects. APIs and integration capabilities are available to enrich data and provide change logs, ensuring seamless integration with both SAP and non-SAP systems.
Data Stewardship and Compliance
SAP MDG includes built-in master data stewardship tools to monitor data management processes, ensuring compliance with governance policies and regulatory requirements. These tools empower data stewards to oversee data quality maintenance and resolve any data conflicts efficiently.
Benefits
- Improved Data Quality: Ensures high-quality, consistent, and accurate master data across the enterprise.
- Operational Efficiency: Streamlines data management processes, reduces errors, and eliminates data silos.
- Compliance: Helps maintain regulatory compliance by enforcing data governance policies.
- Decision-Making: Supports data-driven decision-making through accurate and reliable analytics.
- Centralized Management: Provides a centralized platform for creating, maintaining, and overseeing master data.
By leveraging SAP Master Data Governance, organizations can significantly enhance their operational efficiency, improve decision-making, and drive better business outcomes through the effective management and governance of their master data.