Benefits of SAP MDG for Your Business

When implementing reliable MDG models and programs, is a multi-department and multi-workstream task that requires business and technology efforts with focus on data management. It is best to handle as an independent project bringing all business areas together and having business sponsors and an assigned budget. If planned correctly an MDG project may result in proven ROI in many areas of the company and be justified with sponsors.

The benefits far outweigh the costs, and having a compact and centralized system can boost employee usage confidence, company growth, and confirm data integrity and security.

For most companies there are high costs that come with maintaining data for a multitude of reasons: unclean or flawed data can lead to significant unexpected costs due to the need for the data to be recleaned and fed back into the system. Also ensuring data quality at the highest level and maintaining that data can lead to higher costs. SAP’s MDG program helps to limit or eliminate these kinds of errors by creating one management center that monitors your data at every step.

MDG can also help to solve those pain points that are bound to cause issues in any company. By helping your company evaluate and identify which pain points are being sustained by your data and data management, you can quickly develop solutions that solve these issues.

With new, more advanced ERP systems such as S/4HANA, it is crucial that the data being used is consistent and reliable for these systems to properly function.  Data security and governance relies on and assumes that the integrity of data is intact and that making an investment in new technologies will only work if you feed them clean, reliable data. These systems can then help manage and organize that data to ensure that the analytics received are accurate and lead to growth.

Pitching SAP MDG to Executives

Learning how to leverage data and data governance ensures that you improve business outcomes such as gained trust and compliance, identifying new opportunities through data analysis, addressing regulatory requirements and, the most important aspect of data management, ensuring security and integrity. The Return on Investment while using the SAP MDG program has proven that both time related and non-time related savings can occur from the use of MDG.

Master data governance encourages collaboration between the business, who owns the master data, and IT sponsors, who provide the tools. By establishing rules, responsibilities, processes, and KPIs, you can plan a phased approach to help you successfully maintain, utilize, and understand the master data that you are working with to help build a business case, while prioritizing goals that are significant, achievable, and successful (fostering organizational confidence and continued support).

Additional Technology Aspects

There are other technologies that lend themselves useful to management of master data. Various modern open interface technologies are useful because of their ability to support data governance throughout various aspects of a company’s technology process and applications. SAP’s MDG solution can work efficiently along with non-SAP systems thanks to its open architecture.

SOA stands for a “Service Operated Architecture.” Essentially, SOAs help define ways that software can be reused within service interfaces, and instead of using unique communication systems that make them hard to transfer and reuse, they communicate using common standards that avoid deep integration each time on a new project or application. The benefit of being able to reuse service interfaces, rather than rebuilding them every time means greater business agility and a faster time to market, increased legacy functionality, and improved collaboration between business analysts and developers, to help gain more effective and accurate insights.

API stands for “Application Programming Interface,” and it is a software that acts as an intermediary between two applications, allowing them to communicate with one another. APIs offer an extra layer of security, because the two applications are never fully in touch with one another; instead, each application requests and receives only the essential information that it needs to fulfill a request. Because APIs have advanced in recent years, they have become more developer friendly and standardized, resulting in a greater discipline for security and data governance. Increased standardization has also led to greater documentation of the product lifecycle and its expectations.

By using various technologies to help further the accuracy and legitimacy of your data, your company can maintain cutting-edge analysis to help inform business decisions. Not only this, but in using various technologies to improve the quality of your data, you build trusting client relationships and build brand reputation. Data governance is key to staying ahead of the pack and maintaining the best data.

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Written by Cara Ridenhour, Arturo Blasi, and Ashley Stufano