Using Master Data in
Business Intelligence
Colin White BI Research
March 2007 Sponsored by SAP Using Master Data in Business Intelligence
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE IMPORTANCE OF MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT 1 What is Master Data Management? 2 The Business Benefits of MDM 2 The Ultimate Goal: Enterprise MDM 3 Business Area MDM versus Enterprise MDM 5
IMPLEMENTING MDM 6 Operational Master Data 6 Business Intelligence Master Data 6 Where Should Historical Master Data be Managed? 8 An Evolutionary Approach to MDM 9
THE SAP NETWEAVER MDM SOLUTION 11 SAP Support for Master Data Management 11 Using SAP NetWeaver MDM 13
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BI Research Using Master Data in Business Intelligence
THE IMPORTANCE OF MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT
The current industry focus on master data management (MDM) creates the impression that MDM is a brand new technology, but this not the case. Companies have been building their own custom-built business transaction (BTx) solutions for managing operational master data for many years, and business intelligence (BI) applications and their underlying data warehouses have been providing a single view of key master data entitles such as customers and products for analytical purposes for some time.
Master data should What is new about MDM is that enterprises are beginning to realize that master data be managed needs to be managed and integrated outside of the traditional business transaction separately from and business intelligence environments, and then used to supply BTx and BI business transaction applications with the master data they need (see Figure 1). Another important and BI systems development in MDM is that vendors are providing packaged solutions that ease and reduce the effort involved in deploying an MDM environment and its associated applications.
This paper reviews the current status of MDM, and offers suggestions for planning, building and deploying an MDM environment. The paper proposes an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach to MDM, and examines how the MDM environment can be used in conjunction with BI applications and an underlying data warehousing environment to improve the decision making process. It also presents an overview of the SAP MDM solution and how it supports many of the ideas presented in this paper. Figure 1. The three types of IT processing
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BI Research 1 Using Master Data in Business Intelligence
WHAT IS MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT?
Master data is reference data about an organization's core business entitles. These entities include people (customers, employees, suppliers), things (products, assets, ledgers), and places (countries, cities, locations). The applications and technologies used to create and maintain master data are part of a master data management (MDM) system. MDM, however, involves more that applications and technologies, it also requires an organization to implement policies and procedures for controlling how master data is created and used.
The system of record One of the main objectives of an MDM system is to publish an integrated, accurate, is the gold copy of and consistent set of master data for use by other applications and users. This master data integrated set of master data is called the master data system of record (SOR). The SOR is the gold copy for any given piece of master data, and is the single place in an organization that the master data is guaranteed to be accurate and up to date.
The goal is for the Although an MDM system publishes the master data SOR for use by the rest of the MDM system to also IT environment, it is not necessarily the system where master is created and be the primary maintained. T... [download for more]
