Yesterday I went through a very interesting blog written by Ravi Kumar titled ‘Can we use SAP MDM for Central master data management?’ and that inspired me to write this blog. Here I would like to talk about a CMDM scenario which involved heterogeneous landscape including SAP MDM, SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP PI. We implemented a Master data governance solution for Customer Data maintenance which included Global as well as local attributes for the customer which included General Data, Controlling data and Sales Area Information for the Customer.
Since MDM workflows had several limitations as rightly highlighted in Ravi’s Blog, we chose the Netweaver BPM for implementing the Workflow functionality for various Customer Maintenance scenarios such as Create/Change/Extend & Block. BPM helped us to create a workflow that had:
- Dynamic approvers based on various criteria (e.g., Process Based, Customer Type based, Sales Org based)
- Ability to support Parallel Approval flows
- Dynamic number of approval steps as required for different customers
- Automated email notifications at each step of the approval process
- Ability to measure KPI’s
- Role based access to the applications
- Flexibility for approvers to send back the request for correction
- Request Tracking Mechanism
- SLA Violation measurement
- Request Archiving Functionality
- Several other functionalities, the list goes on
In my humble opinion, SAP Netweaver BPM can almost solve all our workflow related limitations and whats more this has been the center of attraction for a while. With CE 7.2 coming out with much improved features, I am hoping that 7.3 would be even better J.
