SAP Master Data Governance for Governing Retail Articles

The purpose of this blog is to give you a quick overview on the consulting solution which is available now to govern retail article data using MDG.

MDG as a solution has been validated to work with the IS Retail system for more than a year now, but so far the content (data model, UI and logic) available on MDG framework, was only for  customers, suppliers, BP, Finance objects and materials.Customers could of course build their own article data model and UI on top of the MDG framework, but were left with a lot of open questions around the architecture to follow, how the UI should be modelled, etc. and had to deal with complexities of bringing the retail business logic into MDG. On top of this, the effort and time involved to build a model as complex as the one in SAP IS Retail was  too much and not really suitable for customers who wanted to get it running quickly.

Now with the new consulting solution which is offered, we will be able to govern also retail articles using MDG’s powerful data governance and enrichment platform.

The solution, which is in its second version now, not only provides the article data model  and  UI  for staging and governing retail articles, but also benefits from  its tight integration with the IS Retail system to provide the business logic and customization settings already done on the retail system. This way, the data quality is enforced exactly when data is captured in the governance process , ensuring that data governed in MDG, is fully compliant to your retail business rules when its replicated to the IS Retail system.

What is the architecture?

For those of you who are familiar with the MDG architecture , MDG for Articles uses a ‘reuse’ architecture, which means the solution is able to fully leverage the IS Retail customizing logic including concepts like reference handling, which is an integral part of the IS retail system and is automatically able to  replicate into your retail tables after governance.

In short the architecture is kept aligned to the architecture of the other MDG domains like MDG for Materials , Suppliers etc.

The solution uses the underlying MDG framework to provide the governance functionalities like change documents, workflow, customizable UI , tight
integration into the business rules framework for additional validations and defaulting  etc. And of course the architecture is extensible, so you are able to extend the pre-delivered content with your landscape specific extensions on the data model and the UI

Feature Highlights:

• Data governance for structured and unstructured Retail Article types including Single, Generic, Set, Prepack and Display
• Supports the reference handling logic of the IS Retail system
• Support for Full Products , Empties and BoM (for structure articles)
• Characteristics handling and variant creation.
• Data views for Basic, Purchasing, Listing and Logistics (more views to come)

Figure 1 : Showing the Article Change Request screen with some of the fields and the article image on the side panel.

The overall idea of this consulting solution is to make it easier for customers to use MDG for their Retail master data and decrease the time to value.  The solution attempts to cover all the complexities around designing the architecture and core retail functionality on top of the MDG framework, so that you can focus on your business specific requirements and not worry about bringing in the core retail logic.

Hope this information was useful and if you have questions feel free to post them on the blog or write to me with your queries.