Central work center

The work center bundles all activities required to create and change business partner master data. The search is supposed to be the starting point for all these processes.

Business partner categories

Three business partner categories with category-specific attributes are supported:

You can use these business partner categories as search criteria. Business partner relationships are supported to reflect the specific types of business connection between business partners.

Extensibility of data model

The extensibility of the data model allows you to configure the governance process for additional business partner attributes and customer fields. In this way all important business partner attributes can be put under governance without custom development or modifications.

Governance scope: Deactivate entity types and fields

The governance scope enables you to put only parts of the data model under governance. It provides the flexibility to exclude entity types or fields from the governance process and allows to maintain these fields in the local systems. The master data administrator defines which entity types or fields are under governance.

Import master data

The import master data function enables you to upload business partner master data from an XML file into an SAP hub system (ERP system or industry-specific system). Depending on the data to be uploaded you have the following options:

Using a change request, the uploaded data can be adjusted and modified. In a final step, after the change request has been approved, the data is written to the business partner master data tables. We strongly recommend to execute the initial load of business partner master data to MDG by using this functionality and selecting the option to store the data directly in the business partner master data tables. The import can also be parallelized to ensure good performance when dealing a large amount of data. To extract business partner data from an SAP system and write it to an XML file, you can use the transaction MDM_CLNT_EXTR.

If the change request is rejected, no business partner ID is created. To increase transparency, planned changes as well as incomplete data are visible to the concerned user group.

Search

The search offers you the following features:

Data cleansing and merging

Potential duplicates can be found using the search or the duplicate check. If similar master data records are considered to be duplicates, a cleansing case can be created. A master data specialist can then investigate whether these business partner data records are duplicates and if so, merge the best data of all records into one single master data record.

Change requests

The use of change requests enables you to conduct an integrated process of master data maintenance. This process starts with a request by a business user, continues with processing and commenting by different experts and stakeholders, and finishes with the approval or the rejection by an authorized expert. Depending on the specific business use, different types of change requests like Create, Change, Block, or Mark for Deletion are offered. All information related to a specific master data change is stored in one central place. The individual steps of a change process are triggered automatically by the workflow and the status of any change easily can be monitored.

Single object maintenance

The single object maintenance offers the features of change requests mentioned above to create or change master data for a single business partner.

Staging area

The staging area enables you to edit and store inactive versions of business partner data. As long as a change request for the creation or change of a business partner is in progress, the attributes of this business partner are stored in an inactive version. In the event of a change, the inactive version exists in parallel to the current active version. Once approved, the data is written as the active version to the master data tables and is available for business processes. To increase the process and data quality, incomplete business partner data or unapproved changes are stored as inactive version in the staging area; only completed and approved business partners can be used in business processes.

Data quality services

The data quality services offer features like name and address verification, data enrichment, a basic version check, and a duplication check. All these features are integrated into the course of the process but can also be triggered at any point in time.

Authorization check

The authorization check enables you to reuse the authorization defined in the MDG hub systems.

Automated distribution

The automated distribution of changes in business partner master data enables you to distribute sets of data changes to several systems using ALE and enterprise services. Point-to-point distribution is supported without installation of the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP NetWeaver PI) or other middleware solutions.

Key and value mapping

The key and value mapping supports you in dealing with heterogeneous system landscapes. It enables the distribution of business partner master data into systems with a nonharmonized customizing and into systems with business partner IDs that are not identical to the IDs in the client system.