Manage all your master data with one integrated solution

As long as the data resides in silos, it will continue to evolve independently and sometimes in conflict. Decisions and processes based on unsynchronized master data lead to greater risk, greater waste and greater customer dissatisfaction.

For example, a bank teller cannot present appropriate promotions to a client, such as a home equity debt consolidation loan, because he does not have a complete view of the client’s active accounts. An item categorized as ‘office supplies’ in one system might appear as ‘stationery’ in another and ‘paper’ in a third. A car part might be available from five different vendors, each using a different part number. The same part might be used in three different makes in two different model years, unnecessarily duplicating specification data. This disarray results in intensive and expensive manual labor, errors in processing, costly delays, lost revenue opportunities and unnecessary expenditures.

The problem is not limited to customer service or purchasing or to any single industry. Studies in the financial services industry, for example, estimate that as many as 30 percent of brokerage transactions fail due to the lack of harmonized master data.

Sequential processes within manufacturing are just as susceptible. A research and innovation group, for example, may design a next-generation product – but if the subsequent introduction process used to launch that product continues to rely on an older product code with different characteristics, the effect can be disastrous.

The SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) component lets you consolidate, harmonize, distribute and centrally manage master data. Because it supports any type of data source, you can leverage your legacy systems and applications. Whatever your industry – from consumer products and distribution, to manufacturing, public sector, retail and telecommunications – you can improve your business processes, responsiveness and decision-making capability by aggregating and improving the reliability of your master data.

Create a hub for enterprise information

SAP NetWeaver MDM lets you approach master data management in phases: consolidate, harmonize and distribute master data as well as manage rich product content, global data synchronization and customer data integration. With your master data centralized, you can manage, synchronize, distribute and publish it efficiently – internally and externally – to all relevant users.

Consolidate master data

Consolidation can address the challenge of spend analysis as well as optimize sourcing and procurement by giving you better visibility of your customers, suppliers, assets, employees and products. Consolidated data can be analyzed through the pre-integrated SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) component.

The process of consolidation includes importing, de-duplication and normalization, ID mapping, matching and merging, staging, change tracking, interactive data quality analysis, and ad hoc consolidation services.

First, aggregate master data from disparate sources, either SAP or non-SAP. Because prebuilt business content is available, you can reduce implementation times and more easily consolidate data from various systems that have different data models. However, the solution also supports custom data models as well. With SAP NetWeaver MDM’s truly flexible data model, you can choose the best option for your enterprise. Next, enrich your master data through SAP NetWeaver MDM enrichment services, a feature that enables MDM to communicate with external data enrichment vendors such as Trillium. These services are integrated into MDM and provide an open framework that can be extended through adapters offered by partners.

After you have consolidated your master data, experience unparalleled search performance with multiple search mechanisms in which every dimension is interlinked. You can even index and search PDF files. In seconds, you can easily search an entire repository with any item or group of items. Partial strings and equivalents are indexed to increase positive results. Performance is measured in milliseconds rather than seconds – even when you are managing repositories containing up to millions of records.

Harmonize master data

In addition to its master data consolidation features, SAP NetWeaver MDM harmonizes data via an interactive distribution model that updates master data in SAP and non-SAP systems alike. It also incorporates data workflow, enabling multi-tiered, role-based models within an enterprise to maintain master data. And it can maintain master data from a system of record and act as a central hub for automatically updating information in other systems. Information can be extracted to a business intelligence warehouse within the SAP NetWeaver platform for use in analysis.

Centralize master data management

The master data is consolidated from multiple source systems, and a master record is created and centrally managed. Users can manage this information directly using a rich client application. Information can be syndicated or distributed using industry standard XML formats to other systems as required. Additionally, information can be extracted to a business intelligence warehouse within the SAP NetWeaver platform for use in SAP Analytics applications. Centralized user management is enabled with lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) authentication.

Manage rich product content

Manage information about complex products with associated taxonomies and hierarchies, as well as any kind of unstructured content such as PDFs and images with aggregated master data that can be imported from various SAP and non-SAP sources. Single-pass data normalization (with built-in units of measure and conversions) plus high-performance parametric search features provide an interactive method of working with rich product information. Full-text indexing and search of PDF documents is also supported. The information can then be presented through predefined roles.

Fully integrated publishing capabilities enable both electronic output for web and print publishing from a single master repository. You can create printed catalogs seamlessly through integration with industry-standard desktop publishing tools such as Adobe InDesign. And you can publish restructured and reformatted extracts or incremental updates of your repository content and distribute them to different subsidiaries, division, regions or trading partners in several delimited text and XML formats – on an interactive basis.

Synchronize global data

By enabling extraction of product information from SAP or non-SAP data sources, SAP NetWeaver MDM leverages your foundation of rich product content with attributes required for industry data pools such as 1Sync (formerly known as UCCnet and Transora), then synchronizes your data with these pools to meet mandates in the consumer products industry.

Integrate customer data

By consolidating and managing customer data from all available sources, SAP NetWeaver MDM ensures that your enterprise has constant access to the most up-to-date and complete view of customer data available. Maintaining a reliable store of customer data is essential to the effectiveness of your sales, marketing and customer service operations.

SAP NetWeaver MDM helps you build and enrich a reliable customer data repository to coordinate customer processes across business units and locations more efficiently. In providing you a complete picture of your existing customer relationships, you can impact the top line by supporting cross-selling and up-selling efforts, enable accurate analysis to make better decisions and improve the performance of your existing business applications such as CRM.

Enhance processes, cut costs and boost your bottom line

SAP NetWeaver MDM helps you achieve significant process enhancements and cost savings across the enterprise. Most significantly, you can:

• Empower your business to operate with unified enterprise information: You can build a foundation around a next-generation enterprise services oriented architecture with a solution that not only addresses immediate problems (such as product information management and customer data information) but also accommodates your future needs.
• Improve business processes and increase productivity: By sharing reliable and accurate master data in a centrally managed master data repository, you can reduce manual processing efforts and costly errors. You can also compose new, innovative processes and access data through enterprise Web services.
• Boost cross-selling and up-selling: By identifying relationships between and among entities, you can increase each consumer’s average purchase and improve your internal support processes.
• Generate quantifiable ROI with an end-to-end solution: SAP NetWeaver MDM can manage all of your master data objects with a single solution. As a component of SAP NetWeaver – a pre-integrated, open platform that includes business process management, application integration, and business analytics – the solution lowers your total cost of ownership, speeds and simplifies implementation and reduces deployment and maintenance costs.
• Dramatically reduce the time and expense of print publishing: SAP NetWeaver MDM lets you disseminate information directly from a centralized repository to popular desktop publishing programs as well as automatically generate fully formatted and populated page layouts.
• Drive better business decisions with a single version of the truth: Pre-integrated with the SAP NetWeaver BI component, the MDM solution enables you to leverage harmonized data, increasing the reliability of your analyses and reports. More accurate data means more accurate analyses, which lead to better-informed decisions.
• Save on implementation costs: You can now implement in weeks, not months or years, using a solution that does not require other SAP applications and is database agnostic.

If you would like to know more about SAP NetWeaver master data management, please visit www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver/masterdata/.