Master data is data that is not connected to a particular transaction, but is used in many instances within an enterprise, such as customer information, product descriptions and vendor lists. If you're thinking about implementing an MDM initiative, and are looking for more MDM information, you might ask: What is SAP MDM? In this SAP MDM overview, learn master data management concepts, and find out how experts look at MDM, specifically in SAP environments.
SAP NetWeaver MDM provides a generic infrastructure for multi-domain master data management. This is all perfectly described on the MDM home and the MDM 7.1 pages at SDN. However, bundled information about the business content delivered with the software and its benefits in implementation projects was somehow missing, or at least less obvious to find.
You may be aware that organizational intricacies are often an issue when it comes to designing the perfect data model to manage a company’s master data. Reiterated discussions and redesign cycles cost worthy time and effort. And once you are through with it, you’ll probably spend even more time integrating it into your IT landscape! In such a situation, predefined business content for SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management can help to reduce the implementation effort, and save you time and money.
Watch this new SDN presentation to get informed on the exisiting MDM business content and planned content enhancements
I’m happy to announce the release of a new whitepaper: "Platform Design, TCO, and Cost-Effective Flexibility: The Role of Solaris in Support of SAP Enterprise Applications." What excites me about this new paper is that it really outlines the imperatives facing the CIO today and then provides answers to those challenges:
Under these conditions, scalability is necessary. You need that scalability across heterogeneous existing hardware and you need a truly top-tier operating system to orchestrate the pieces effectively. In Hasso's keynote speech - The Power of Speed - at Sapphire last month, he used a few vivid examples of how the data retrieval paradigms used by most enterprise's operating systems vastly underutilize the capacity of the hardware you already have. He compares the cycle time of one processor to the number of cycles needed to retrieve data for business applications to “going to Mars to get a sip of water.” It’s quite astounding when you think of it that way, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing.
This paper tells the story of how the Solaris and SAP combination is ideal for meeting these challenges I have described above. It will make the SAP community more aware of how Solaris solves a lot of problems that people are seeking to solve by using lots of separate technologies, which can run you into hazardous and expensive territory when support and integration issues arise. In addition to racking up some of the most impressive SAP performance benchmarks, Sun has facilities based in Walldorf – The Solaris Lab for SAP that allows other HW vendors to certify their platform for SAP on Solaris and also provides partners and customers questions for any related Sun and SAP question for Solaris (saponsolaris@sun.com). Of course you can always visit our wiki too!
Many people know Solaris is the leading enterprise software operating system. What many people don’t realize is that Solaris is supported on over 1000 x86 and SPARC platforms—delivers the performance, stability and security that users and customers demand. Solaris has a platform for virtualization, for security, and for a related file system all in one package that is engineered to meet the needs of the enterprise. Solaris is a one-stop shop for meeting all of these challenges. The recent blog by Andre Bogelsack gives a great overview of how the University of Munich uses Solaris and it's built in virtualization capabilities to serve 82,000+ students. Pretty Impressive!
You can get the paper by going to https://www.sun.com/offers/details/Solaris_for_SAP_Enterprise.xml, but I’d like to summarize some of the highlights.
This paper demonstrates the big trends I’ve outlined here: cloud computing, virtualization, server sprawl, and the need for Green IT. It then demonstrates how Solaris delivers a stable, reliable, scalable and innovative solution for all of these demands.
Customers benefit from the singular vision and engineering muscle that created Solaris, while, through OpenSolaris, they can also capitalize on the flexibility of open source.
The paper describes how easy it is to migrate your SAP installation to Solaris (which has binary compatibility, by the way, which many other operating systems don’t – so if you need to run a Solaris 8 application on Solaris 10, you can).
Then you can see how Solaris is optimized for virtualization and high-availability computing, even on ordinary commodity hardware. Customers who switch to Solaris have recorded an average 30 to 40% decrease in downtime.
Solaris is free. You can get started today. Solaris can run on the full range of hardware available. Additional details about Hardware Certification for SAP on Solaris x64 can be found at saponsolaris.com.
Again, I encourage you to download the paper and see for yourself. It’s a succinct document that illustrates clearly why the Solaris platform is ideal for running your SAP installation, and indeed your entire enterprise.
Checked an article that Coke is using RFID technology to collect information of Customer perspective (Coke's RFID-Based Dispensers Redefine Business Intelligence). It is wonderful utilization of technology. The collected information will be used to formalize correct and effective strategy and processes to meet the specific demands.
Intelligence is always required. The Data mining, analytics offers complete new environs of Information. This experiment again emphasizes and proves that right information is very vital. I am not sure if it’s already capturing the climate conditions, type of outlet at the time of drink order in dispenser. This kind of information, trends are very important in establishing or redefining the strategy, rectify mistakes (if any) to achieve more success.
The type of outlet is important for any company since only right and complete information leads to right decisions. For example, in a burger joint or pizza joint cold drinks will sell more. However at the eating joint, beer will sell more. Moreover time is important since in evening, tea might sell more and in morning juices will win.
The right information puts the right perspective to the reports clients regularly see or want to see. This simplifies the job of management or may be rectifies will be right word.
http://sapmdmtutorials.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-new-around-world-of-mdm-sap-guys.html
URL: http://www.tcdii.com/links/vendorproducts.html
I see large SAP shops also having competitive products and more so a partner has the cruel and cross bearing job to give the best of breed solution - more so when he or she is more comfortable with the SAP Ecospace.
I find the constant updates from other product vendors in the MDM space to be a good point to actually look at SAP MDM from a different hat. While the information of the updates is seeked from different sources, the inferences and observations are with my experience with the products and interactions with key users and experts in that field.
Let us take for example couple of updates which have been published in the new suite of MDM :
A) Kalido - an old horse with a niche fan following has brought in a matching capability within the matching engine. This uses the bitpartite graphs which is also a good feature. How do we compare this with SAP MDM - Personally SAP MDM wins hands down however bitpartite is best run by Netrics matching has DQ - global ID functionality built in. Food for thought for SAP Folks.
Ref:www.cnbc.com/id/30961009
B) Oracle - probably the least threat concieved by the MDM players ; It has decided to sell product data cleansing solution in conjunction with its product data hub with one of its partner in the market. SAP MDM - should not be a problem for has a clear leader board adavantage with oracle on the MDM front.
Ref:www.tcdii.com/oraclemdm.html
C) Last but surely not the least - SAP's biggest threat IBM MDM; Exeros to be aquired by IBM - impact : the IBM WPC is now tougher and stronger having capabilities of profiling during the data doscovery phase during a mdm program. My view from the SAP family and fan club- the BO suite integration in MDM7.0 and further roadmaps would be really the key to break free stringent competition in this space. Siperian and dataflux who are players in this segment would also see this as oppurtunity to share the pie. MDM implementation hence would be further elaborate to make sure data profiling and diligence time required for the same being extended. Consultants , partners need to be aware of more integration techniques and pre-req's required during an implemention.
Ref:www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=976312
While I feel this is early days in the slow economy aquisitions to restate the pie under a new banner - it is surely challenging to see more products in this domain. If you felt implementation was tough - now you have the changes and buy-outs to keep an eye out for.
I would welcome thoughts and more insights on the products my fellow sdn bloggers have come across. I am sure these are quite argueable and hence idea of a blog and have opinions and substantiate the same with demos.
Rajesh Iyer Rajesh involved in the strategic management of complex Proof Of Concepts, Pilots and Custom Demonstrations to clients, COIL with SAP and various prospects in the SAP MDM space. He has carved several accolades from clients and customers. He has also been a key contributor in a technical pre-sales role where he often had to not only prove out the capabilities of the SAP product in extremely demanding and challenging environments but also had to craft the correct messaging for the relevant groups evaluating the software with competitive products such as IBM MDM , Hyperion and Kalideo.
Managing global product hierarchies for an organization can be a huge challenge, especially when there are multiple systems & no ownership of managing the hierarchies. This blog is not to provide more information on importing or syndicating hierarchies, but I have tried to explain how management of complex hierarchies can be a strong business case while implementing MDM.
The need to manage Product Hierarchy
Any organization offering products or services for sell, need to categorize there offerings systematically. A simplistic way to group different products is by grouping them in distinct Product Lines. But many times this high level grouping does not suffice especially for organizations have a large exclusive product offerings. Hence, it is necessary to drill to a logical level of hierarchy where a finished good can be linked. This can be achieved by creating a logical hierarchy which can not only help in categorizing the Products but also in analytics & forecasting.
Building a Product Hierarchy
Few points to keep in mind while building a product hierarchy:
A product hierarchy can be built by grouping products by Line, Type, Family, Group, Series etc. The order & the levels of these categories must be identified carefully so as to avoid expansion or repetition of nodes.
Strong capabilities of SAP MDM
SAP MDM comes with a strong mechanism to build, manage hierarchies & is one of the strong business cases for implementing MDM in organization. MDM allows you to easily manage complex product hierarchies, import it from excel files & automatically create a tree structure.
SAP MDM provides features to add sibling, child, sort the tree etc. This makes it a strong tool. Additional functionalities like Taxonomy, Images etc add to the strength of the tool. Capability of SAP MDM to trigger Workflows on hierarchy table help in better management of hierarchies.
Though Product hierarchy is a lookup reference data for master data objects like Material & Products, it still can be managed centrally using SAP MDM. Syndicating the changes / additions in hierarchy can be easily managed using SAP MDM & can help in having a synchronized, unified hierarchical product classification. Further, it can also be leveraged during Catalog Management, SRM & with BI to perform analytics.
