New! Master Data Management

Introduction

Meaningless reports, problems with your day to day business. Many organizations suffer because the data that puts reports in context or drives business transactions like product delivery is simply not correct!

This solution enables you not only to analyze the master data but also to take immediate corrective action. That is find an error and fix it in SAP with a single mouse click.  

Data Quality Measures

Out of the box our solution delivers the typical measures to manage data quality. Added to that are our unique measures that relate master data to facts in SAP. For example we spot customers that have never placed an order or vendors without purchase orders. We are also continuously adding country specific checks based on for example national postal code tables.

Data completeness checks what data is missing or invalid. Notorious are reports were for example revenue is grouped by customer group but a significant percentage of the revenue is allocated to the “not assigned” group.

Data conformity is about data being compliant to a ”predictable” format. For example a postal code in the Netherlands is 7 digits long and formatted as 4 characters, space, 2 digits (e.g. 1000 AA). Incompliancy is often a token of a bigger problem.

Data duplication is when the same entity has multiple entries in the data repository. This can lead to significant problems in the operational process like discounts that are not granted simply because a threshold is not met as the data is spread over multiple records.

When we talk about data accuracy checks we validate the content it self. For example a check whether a city “exists” in a certain country. We have seen cases  were in the copying (cloning) of master data records the country was copied without checking. The result Amsterdam and Berlin both being a city in The Netherlands.

In our data integrity checks we relate the master data records to other data from the source system. For example a measure to spot customers without transactions (like sales orders). 

Master data creation, distribution

Many dedicated software vendors position the creation and distribution of the master data as the core value adding component of their solution. They argument that master data is being maintained in different applications, sometimes being different aspects of the same masterdata object. For organizations that use SAP the creation of master data as such is often not the biggest problem as SAP ERP always plays a dominant role in the landscape. The fact that there are still so many issues with the data quality in SAP has more to do with the fact that in SAP ERP checks like described above are missing, the complexity of the transaction processing or the fact that much data has been converted from 'legacy' systems when SAP was implemented.

However many organizations that use SAP still have to exchange master data between applications. Our offering includes a simple application also built with Oracle software. This application fits perfectly with organizations that use SAP or want to start small (think big!). This does not mean that the NewFrontiers solution has limited capabilities. Our solution includes:

• Configurable input forms;
• Calls SAP RFC’s;
• Use SAP functions to check input;
• Stage records in database with status parameter;
• Create SAP batch input;
• Create XML to integrate with other systems;
• Integrate with SOA architectures;
• Under construction update using SAP SOAP interface.

Analyzing and fixing master data with a mouse click

Finding errors is one thing, fixing them is the other. Our solution is fully integrated with the BI environment. Where the profiling tool of Oracle has been created for more technical oriented users we have created an environment making it possible for everybody (even actual Business Users!) to not only analyze data, but even correct it on the spot. For this we have developed cross links with R/3 and intuitive features to fix and correct the problems in SAP ERP. One by one or in batch. Literally with a mouse click!