SAP Solution Brief SAP Services

SAP SERVICES FOR MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT

Managing master data one of your organizations most valuable assets can be difficult. The SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) component helps consolidate, enhance, and store master data, but many organizations seek expert help when planning, building, and running MDM software. The SAP Services organization supports your SAP NetWeaver MDM implementation with a robust portfolio of skills, training, tools, and services.

Master data management (MDM) can be a daunting challenge for companies both large and small. Even though each customer, product, employee, and partner ought to have a unique data identity, a single version of the truth remains an elusive goal for most organizations. Typically stored in disconnected systems and databases, master data tends to be notoriously inaccurate, redundant, incomplete, and even contradictory. The result: high maintenance costs, flawed reporting, inefficient processes, and business decisions based on deficient data. The SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) component helps you clean, consolidate, and harmonize your master data even within heterogeneous IT landscapes. As a key component of the SAP NetWeaver platform, SAP NetWeaver MDM reduces data maintenance costs, ensures data consistency across the enterprise, and greatly improves business analytics and decision making. It also serves as a fundamental building block of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).
The Master Data Challenge

But creating and maintaining a successful approach to master data management is not just a matter of installing software and throwing a switch. Successful master data management depends upon a host of interrelated issues, such as data governance, data quality, change management, and alignment with business goals. All too often organizations start with the best of intentions, but quickly become overwhelmed by the complexity and magnitude of the challenges.

To address this problem, SAP offers a comprehensive portfolio of services to help you during all phases of the master data life cycle. This portfolio includes consulting services from a corps of experienced SAP experts; a full curriculum of SAP NetWeaver MDM training courses; targeted service offerings designed to help you plan, build, and run your software; and a field-tested roster of tools, methods, and best practices that help shorten the journey and lead to secure, efficient, and cost-effective deployments.
A Team of Experts

Backed by more than 30 years of experience and deep industry expertise, SAP consultants have a unique understanding of your business processes and IT issues plus a fundamental understanding of SAP NetWeaver MDM gained by working side by side with SAP development teams.
Training for Your People

It takes many different skill sets to successfully implement master data management software. Depending on your needs and resources, the SAP Consulting organization can provide any or all of the specialists you need to plan, test, customize, and maintain your SAP NetWeaver MDM component. Typical skill sets include: SAP NetWeaver MDM expert: captures business requirements for a data model, performs evaluation study for data complexity, implements the data model, and evaluates integration cases with external systems Portal expert: oversees integration of a portal and SAP NetWeaver MDM components Guided procedures expert: helps capture business and technical requirements for SAP NetWeaver MDM workflows and also helps evaluate and implement workflow-related functionality iViews (portlets) expert: Evaluates, designs, and implements strategy for iView functionality within SAP NetWeaver MDM Integration expert: ensures that all components supporting master data management processes are optimally connected Data quality expert: evaluates data quality issues and configures SAP NetWeaver MDM using appropriate tools and methodology and oversees links to services of third-party data quality specialists SAP NetWeaver MDM solution architect: Has a good understanding of the business processes supported by applications linked to the component and experience in at least four prior SAP NetWeaver MDM implementations

Virtually all SAP NetWeaver MDM implementations involve a significant amount of knowledge transfer. SAP Services offers a time-tested curriculum of training courses and material designed to help your people develop and sharpen the skills they need to optimize your software. Whether it is basic training on SAP NetWeaver fundamentals; special instruction on data consolidation, harmonization, or central management; or even certification as an SAP application or technical consultant, our qualified instructors cover all technical and practical aspects of SAP NetWeaver MDM. You can take courses at one of our training centers located in key regions around the world or utilize our on-site training, which offers substantial cost and time savings and more flexible scheduling. We also provide e-learning options that feature secure, remote access to SAP training systems.
Services Across the SAP NetWeaver MDM Life Cycle

SAP offers a wide range of targeted services designed to support you at every stage of the master data management life cycle from needs assessment and planning through testing, building, running, and continuously improving your master data management software. These services can be delivered by our experienced consulting teams or combined with services from third-party providers. Depending upon your resources and capabilities, SAP blends services at a level of engagement that makes sense for you from providing a basic foundation of knowledge to addressing specific challenges like governance, prototyping, or system sizing all the way up to delivering a complete roster of services that support all phases and levels of an SAP NetWeaver MDM project. The overarching portfolio of services consists of MDM-specific services and specialist services that form part of the SAP Strategic Data Services for SAP NetWeaver MDM service. The service acts

specifically as a broker, bringing together the data quality experts you need to help you achieve the highest-quality master data. It selects from the entire field of people, processes, and technology available from SAP and brings in, as required, special expertise culled out of a rich ecosystem of data quality partners. The result is that you get exactly the expertise required to evaluate, clean up, and enhance your master data. The service then puts data governance processes in place for you that will ensure sustained high quality of your master data.
Planning

Running

Our planning services help you define or improve master data management processes, analyze data quality, and develop an IT road map. These early-phase services provide an initial evaluation of your master data management issues and environment, a suggested plan of action, and an assessment of the costs and benefits associated with potential improvements. Our quick analysis services, for example, give a rough diagnosis of data quality based on a master data sample; full analysis services use comprehensive data profiling techniques and yield a more detailed picture of data quality. Other planning services include sizing, which you can use to determine the optimal number and capacity of servers needed to handle your needs, and a data quality governance service that helps you formalize the roles, rules, and responsibilities that govern master data quality.
Building

Once SAP NetWeaver MDM is up and running, our quality monitoring services verify ongoing data quality and give an early indication of where future problems or opportunities may lie. Best viewed as preventative maintenance for master data, the monitoring service is similar to scanning and profiling activities that are typically used to diagnose data quality at the start of an SAP NetWeaver MDM initiative. The monitoring service verifies ongoing data quality, checks to ensure that data sources are trustworthy, and confirms that master data is being used efficiently. In addition to the monitoring service, enhancement services help to continuously improve the quality of new and existing master data.
Insight into SDS Services and Access to Third-Party Data Quality Providers

With SAP Strategic Data Services for SAP NetWeaver MDM, you gain access to an ecosystem of leading third-party firms data quality partners that specialize in key disciplines related to master data quality. This is possible because, as the worlds largest provider of business software, SAP builds on its market presence and longstanding relationships within the business software industry to forge partnerships with hand-picked specialists. When necessary, it embeds the functionality of their data quality solutions into SAP NetWeaver MDM by means of an enrichment controller framework provided by SAP NetWeaver MDM to fulfill your specific master data needs. There is a reason why being able to choose from among the best specialists and bring them together is very important: focused, in-depth expertise. One third-party provider may specialize in validation, data cleansing, correction of postal codes, or product information management for vertical markets. Another thirdparty provider may be best in class at data profiling, reduplication, data enrichment, or product data classification. You may need several of these services. It goes further: specialization is often specific to a region or a country. But your organization has diverse data quality needs that may reflect the conditions or circumstances of multiple regions or countries. The conclusion: no single data quality partner can provide the best of everything you need.

Once you have gained a new perspective on master data quality, the next step is to improve the accuracy and consistency of the data as it is imported into SAP NetWeaver MDM. SAP offers a number of services that support an initial deployment or the enhancement of an existing system. For example, we perform quality enhancement services such as data cleansing, classification, and enrichment in accordance with data profiling recommendations and your priorities. We also provide a data modeling service to help you design or refine your master data schema, explore options for modeling taxonomies and hierarchies, and translate business requirements into technical specifications.

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For this reason, SAP Strategic Data Services for SAP NetWeaver MDM helps you assemble and integrate exactly the services you need, creating a seamless data quality foundation. One way it does this is by utilizing a data quality enrichment controller framework that integrates the functionality and services of the firms whose different areas of expertise your specific MDM project requires.
Tools and Methodologies

SAP Services provides a comprehensive array of tools and methodologies to help minimize costs and maximize returns on your investment in SAP NetWeaver MDM. Honed over time in numerous projects across a full spectrum of industries and companies, tools and methodologies from SAP Services include: Best practices Best practices anticipate your business needs, reduce costs, and decrease your reliance on external consultants. SAP Services provides fully documented and reusable prototypes that you can use to enhance and improve SAP NetWeaver MDM and related business processes. Continually developed and rolled out, best practice documentation is first created by our regional implementation or field service groups, then made available through the SAP Service Marketplace extranet and the SAP Developer Network site. ASAP ASAP is a proven methodology that gives you control over all deployment processes. Designed to help reduce risks and ensure beneficial results, ASAP is the standard implementation methodology for all SAP applications and technology. In addition to supporting implementation processes, the ASAP methodology incorporates standard design templates and accelerators for every functional area within SAP NetWeaver MDM.

Road map composer tool SAP project managers use the road map composer tool to help select the ASAP activities and deliverables that are relevant to a particular SAP NetWeaver MDM project. This pragmatic tool generates a project-specific extract of key activities, then makes this compendium available to the project team. The tool also contains links to relevant accelerators such as documentation templates and best practices that you can use to streamline project execution.
Support for Your Mission-Critical Software

The SAP Active Global Support organization delivers the assistance you need to optimize the performance of SAP NetWeaver MDM. With a number of different maintenance offerings and servicelevel agreements, you can select the type of support that best meets your needs and budget. Delivered by our global team of experienced specialists, SAP Active Global Support supplies the advice, action, and knowledge transfer you need to maintain and improve SAP NetWeaver MDM.
Powered by SAP NetWeaver

SAP NetWeaver MDM is powered by the SAP NetWeaver platform. SAP NetWeaver unifies technology components into a single platform, providing the best way to integrate all systems running SAP or non-SAP software. SAP NetWeaver also helps organizations align IT with their business. As the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), SAP NetWeaver allows organizations to compose and enhance business applications rapidly to drive business change.
Find Out More

For more information on how SAP Services can help your organization plan, build, and run your SAP NetWeaver MDM initiative, visit us on the Web at www.sap.com.

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