The importance of Master Data

Master data is the core data that is essential to operations in a specific business or business unit. This can be data about customers, material, vendors and much more. Master Data in SAP is the foundation on which transactions are executed. Incorrect or incomplete Master Data is having a direct impact on the processes within companies.

In today’s world the most companies are using Master Data in multiple systems. They need to have Master Data Management (MDM) to manage all this master data. MDM will help companies to store Master Data centrally. One source for Master Data makes sure that the Master Data will be the same in all the different systems. It improves management of the data because it only has to be added or maintained in one place.

How to improve  

McCoy is helping a big global company with improving Equipment Master Data in SAP CS. Equipment Master Data is needed to track all the services and repairs on devices and machines sold to customers. Our client executed a large merger and therefore had to integrate all the data into their SAP system. Due to high time pressure in the project and the deadline of the merger, not all Master Data elements were available in SAP staging before go-live. For this reason, it was not possible to completely verify data upfront.

The biggest issues would be the hard stops for all processes in SAP because of incorrect Master Data. This is having a direct effect on the lead time and customer satisfaction and was a defined as a critical risk that needed to be eliminated.

Define roles and responsibilities

McCoy defined roles and responsibilities regarding master data in cooperation with the other Service & Repair sub-departments. Next to that we did several analyses on the data to improve the data with proactive actions.

All these actions had impact on the Service & Repairs processes. In 17 weeks we had 80% less tickets about incorrect equipment master data. Driven by the results we were able to reduce the team from 7 FTE to 3 FTE and focus on other value adding services.

The result

The most important result is the ongoing processes which we have defined, aligned and documented. The customer business departments are being trained on all kind of topics about Master Data and eventually all activities around equipment master data will be transferred to the business. This will make sure that the continuity is guaranteed in a cost-optimal operation.

If you want to know what MDM can do for your organization, don't hesitate to contact us.