SAP MDM Guiding Principles - FI Specific

[Former Member]

Hi All

My client is looking to consolidate data from various source systems into SAP MDM, focusing primarily on CC, PC and GL accounts.

Are there any guiding principles specific to FI data which will allow them to decide what other data should possibly be taken into SAP MDM?

What about hierarchies - should they be stored in MDM and why?

Your input would be appreciated.

[michael_theis]

Hi,

You shold consider using MDG for Financials instead of SAP NW MDM. The latter one is not able to fulfill common requirements of Financial Data (e.g. hierarchies, time dependency, etc.).

Best regards

Michael

[Erdal_Şimşek]

Hi Michael,

for new projects I agree!

regards,

Erdal

[Erdal_Şimşek]

Hi Nasreen,

perhaps it helps if we emphasize that MDM offers out-of-the-box data models for

• Material
• Customer
• Vendor
• Business Partner
• Employee
• Product

So, for these objects you could make use of the standard content (i.e. there is one repository for each object) without reinventing the wheel!

For the data objects that you've mentioned the first step would probably be to create a proper data model. However, please note that MDM is designed to manage master data. Anything transactional would probably not really fit into the philosophy here.

Once you have designed the data model - you could load the data into MDM (initial load) and start building Validations, matching rules and strategies. You might also might want to think about normalization.

SAP now-a-days recommends to use Data Services (4.2) (former BODS) to do data cleansing, matching and merging and probably loading the cleansed data into MDM. It really depends on your setup and strategy and what the customer asks for.

You can certainly store hierarchies in MDM. But what would be the reason to store anything in MDM? Is there a business requirement? MDM could serve as a hub system that holds global materials and syndicates them to different systems.

Besides, when you consider MDM you might also consider Enterprise Portal or BPM to provide users a user-centric access and govern all kinds of MDM processes.

This is just a few things that I have off the top of my head. I would definitely start with with a requirements document and corresposnding technical aspects on how to realize that technically.

I am sure you know the SAP Help page for MDM but here it is again:

SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (MDM) 7.1 – SAP Help Portal Page

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Erdal