MDM Questions

[Former Member]

Background:

15 Companies on 15 different Legacy Systems.

Phased SAP R3 rollout - one company at a time over x years.

Companies would 'live/maintain/create data' on their legacy systems until such time as they are converted over.

Thinking of using SAP MDM initially as a means of rationalizing like vendors, materials, and customers.

Thinking of using SAP MDM for help with conversion.

Ultimately, would like to use MDM as means of Central Data Management. Once all systems are live, idea would that there is only ONE representation of any given material.

Question 1: How 'good' is MDM at rationalizing/consolidating files? I've heard mixed comments. Why do some companies utilize services like Backoffice?

Question 2: Conversion related question. Legacy system 'A' has 50 vendor attributes. R3 'needs' 300 vendor attributes to run. MDM has 100 attributes. How are the other 200 attributes R3 requires accounted for/loaded?

Question 3: Suppose one of the 15 Legacy systems above is half on SAP and half on their Legacy system. What do companies do with respect to maintenance? Do it in both places? Do it in MDM and use MDM to update the legacy system (how are all the additional fields in the legacy system not in SAP MDM accounted for)?

Question 4: It appears as though MDM only maintains Basic or General data points, and NOT data related to a specific Company Code or Sales/Purchasing Organization. What do companies that want to maintain all their data centrally do? - do they try to model organizational structures in MDM or do they create part of the data creation in MDM and finish it off in R3?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Paul,

Q1: Yes. MDM is good in consolidating data coming from various data sources. To some extent the mixed comments that you heard are true... but, MDM is evolving a lot with each and every Service pack and Sp4 has got better features for consolidating the data when compared to earlier versions.

Q2,Q3 and Q4: I figured out that for all these 3 questions, you answered it yourself. MDM need to have a generic data model that supports all participating System's needs(Please note that all the Standard repositories delivered with MDM are based on Basic R/3 Structures and need to be customised to suit your requirements). Once you have a data model and data in place, if you are maintaining your data centrally in MDM, you can distribute back data to all participating systems.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rajani

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for you response.

In order to model all the data elements required by SAP R/3 that are material related, it would require modeling a large number of other tables in R/3 which are not part of the standard MDM template. This is troublesome in at least two areas that have been identified so far:

1) In order to create material master records for the various plants where we would want to stock it, we would need to create and maintain the entire organizational model. This would be necessary to maintain the fields for things in the company code view, sales organizations, profit centers, plants, etc. In this case, it would entail thousands of other entities and their relationships one to another. This does not seem feasible. Hence the question whether it is best to do this within MDM which is clearly not designed for this, or within SAP R/3 (where the structures already exist, at least for R/3), or elsewhere (remembering our diverse number of legacy systems).

2) The SAP provided R/3 MDM model likewise does not provide for maintenance of much vendor/material information nor other material master information for things like the APO modules, etc. And of course to provide a place for maintenance of this type information for the numerous legacy systems just compounds the difficulty of the proposition.

Thoughts?