Difference between Master Data and Transactional Data

[Former Member]

Hi,

Master Data is "stable" information about the customers, materials, suppliers, facilities, equipment that make up a company's business.

Transactional Data is information about the events (orders, movements, production, payments) that occur on a day-to-day business.

Transactional Data depends (or related) to Master Data.

On other words: Master Data controls how Transactions are processed.

In MDM, we define Customer, Vendor, Employee, Product as Master Data.

Indicators: Each material has a flag describing whether it is an, "A Seller", "B Seller" or "C Seller" is not Master Data.

It can be read it on demand from e.g., a BI System.

But my question is why not keep a Flag variable which get populated on Seller Type which should be a Taxonomy SubCategory and the Flag variable get populated by running an assignment?

Regards

Kaushik Banerjee

Edited by: Kaushik Banerjee on Oct 29, 2008 1:14 PM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Kaushik,

As described by you,there is no harm in storing the flag indicator data as a taxonomy and populate it using assignments.

The only care that needs to be taken is that to make sure this data is not changing frequently.

As MDM is designed for handling master data and so is not equipped well to handle frequent delta changes which are continues and large in number.

If these requirements are not violated then they can be stored in MDM.

But SAP have designed different tools to handle different business problems.Its same as using a separate R/3 system to handle master data or use R/3 system for reporting,then why use MDM or BI for that matter.

simple reason being the separate dedicated tools are designed to handle that particular business problem more efficiently than the other.

Also take note that besides jsut storing the data MDM also performs other tasks of Data validation ,Enrichment and Governance.

Hope It Helped

Thanks & Regards

Simona Pinto

[Former Member]

Hi Kaushik,

Once you have been given an MDM System you can maintain any thing whether it's Master or Transactional data but the main purpose of MDM is to manage the master data i.e. data which change rarely hence the examples Customers, Products etc.

If you maintain transactional data which changes frequently then everytime you need to open the data manager, search for the records and change the values of some of the transactional fields but MDM is not meant for this. Hope you agreed with me.

You are free to store everything but the purpose should be preserved.

Regards,

Jitesh Talreja