Tool to check SAP material master

[Former Member]

Hi,

As most companies operate, we use material master in SAP in various components of ERP such as finance, planning, inventory etc.. The problem we are having is when creating material master, due to the number of parameters being entered, our master data team is ending up with some kind of error such as not putting the right value in a parameter, forgetting the parameter in a field etc. This is causing a lot of painful correction and panic in business depending on at what point we discover the issue.

The intent of this post is to check if any of you have used/using a tool to check the master data soon after creation? We can may be make some rules and have them checked...but just don't see a tool in standard SAP as such...

Has any one ventured to do any thing custom? How are you dealing with this in your day to day business?

Thanks,

K.

[Former Member]

Hi,

If you are not using SAP MDM and using SAP ECC Material Master then follow the below guide -

http://help.sap.com/printdocu/core/Print46c/en/data/pdf/LOMDMM/LOMDMM.pdf

For SAP MDM scenario, view this demo - http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/elearn?rid=/library/uuid/40d18c90-a73d-2d10-d781-b53eefca5e87

Material Master data can be tightly maintained using Workflows either ECC Workflow or SAP MDM Workflow or SAP Portal/BPM workflows.

Basis data restriction is available in all SAP tools, which can put restrictions like mandatory fields and basic data entry validations. None of the SAP tools lacks this functionality.

Thanks,

Shambhu.

[Former Member]

HI Kinapo,

Are you using SAP MDM to maintain your master data?

These problems you mentioned about can be taken care of using MDM validation and many more methods in MDM.

One has to formalize the business rule and build the same logic in MDM,this would ensure that data being created obeys the standards.Now the data which we can claim to be on good standards this way should go under approval process and Maker-Checker concept should be in place,all this and much more is provided in the way of Data Governance in SAP MDM.

To comment any further,please provide the issues you are facing and the systems you are using.

Thanks,

Ravi

[Former Member]

Ravi and Verma,

Thanks a lot for the answers. We are only using SAP ECC system for master data maintenance.

Some of the errors we are experiencing:

1. Master data team forgets extending Material master to a plant

2. Lot sizes wrong,

3. Unit of measure conversions wrong

4. Material setup at wrong storage location

5. Material attributes missing

Using a workflow and getting people to approve before creation of material is a good idea. We will explore the SAP workflow functionality.

Some of these could be avoided by making the fields mandatory.

Appreciate any other suggestions.

Thanks,

K.

[Former Member]

Hi Kinapo,

Thanks for describing issues in detail.

A system should be made intelligent as much that chances of error are minimal.

This can be made possible by have control over processes of data creation/manipulation.

First step towards this can be setting up common standards, streamlining processes and thus ensuring consistent and accurate data.

SAP Workflow can help you in this in big way,please go through this link which has FAQ on SAP Workflow:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/ABAP/SAPBusinessWorkflow

Also go through this very informative article on why SAP Workflow:

http://www.insightcp.com/res_23.html

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Ravi