Enterprise Material Master Data Management/Governance
August 2, 2022?|??Vladimir Stavrov
Why and How IBA Group Created IBA HOTD
As a longtime partner and solution provider of SAP AG, IBA Group has been delivering enterprise master data management solutions based on SAP MDM since 2012 and has begun delivering solutions on SAP MDG shortly after its inception in 2011.
In most cases, we do not implement solutions from scratch, because by the time a customer makes a decision to clean up their master data, they accumulate a significant amount of legacy data, including material master data. As the number of duplicate, incorrect, inconsistent, and irrelevant records in the legacy material master data is typically enormous, conversion brings about a 2-3-fold reduction in master data volumes.
When implementing SAP MDM / MDG solutions, customers incur significant costs on normalization of source master data and preparation of?golden records?to be loaded into SAP MDM / MDG systems before their commercial operation.
One of the key problems in the creation of master data is identification of a material master record. A common practice in building legacy master data was the use of short names for the materials coming from shipping documents.
EXAMPLE
The characteristics of this tape are presented in a free text format, which is acceptable for human perception, but not suitable for automatic processing. For automatic processing tasks like search or purchase of a material with a set of specific values, a unified description structure is required. Creation of a description structure involves building a Classifier in the form of a taxonomy or ontology, presented as a tree of nodes and a set of characteristics inherent for each of the nodes.
SAP ERP, SAP MDG, and SAP HANA ERP / MDG provide the tools needed for creating and maintaining a corporate classifier. However, in most cases, verified records must be prepared and loaded into the system before one can use the tools.
领英推荐
Typically, it is possible to create correct data through the extraction of material-forming characteristics based on their values. In the example with the tape, such characteristics are Brand (Scotch), Tape Thickness (18 mm), Tape Material (Polyvinyl Chloride, Vinyl), Breaking Strength (30 N/cm), Color (Yellow), and others.
From a brief description of the tape?Scotch Vinyl Electrical Tape 35, one cannot identify the values of the characteristics without an additional description. Because of lack of detail, this tape name can be associated with a number of tapes with different characteristics.
If different incoming materials are registered with the same name?Scotch Vinyl Electrical Tape 35?as a unique identifier, it results in data inconsistency. This causes confusion when it is required to transfer a specific material to production.
Another shortcoming of identification by short name is that it may lead to the creation of duplicate entries. Small variations in the short name may result in duplication. For example, one can put?Scotch Vinyl El.Tape 35?or use different measurement units for the same material.
If there are duplicates in the system, especially with different measurement units, companies cannot make estimates of their stocks for a specific material and hence correctly replenish the stock. Most often, losses occur due to excessive purchases and storage of excessive amounts of materials in warehouses.
Various groups of specialists made significant efforts to solve the identification problem at the methodological level and in practice, resulting in the creation of relevant ISO standards and systems.
Read more about IBA HOTD, and how it helps normalize your master data and automate data exchange in logistics chains:
https://blog.ibagroupit.com/2022/08/enterprise-material-master-data-management-governance/
Digital Communications & Reputation Management at IBA Group
2 年This is how #datanormalization works