SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment

Why Master Data Enrichment?

Master data is the backbone of an enterprise as all the business units of an enterprise relies on it. As an organization grows, different business units build their own systems, processes and applications. Over a period, a single view of the customer, vendor, product and other entities are lost, and there are multiple copies with variations of master data.

Getting this sorted needs buy in from all stakeholders – business heads, application maintainers, individual sales and marketing teams of each unit. This itself is challenging, even though conceptually everyone agrees on the need.

The challenge is vastly aggravated by current MDM (master data management) solutions as current master data management systems continue to be old packages requiring MDM specialists to configure them for months before any good can come out of them. Out of all these challenges, the critical one is maintaining master data in an efficient way and keep it neat, clean and up-to-date all the time.

Master Data and DaaS

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment (Data Cloud) is a new DaaS (Data as Service) offering by SAP to industrialize the use of 3^rd party data for enterprise applications, enabling customers to find, procure and consume relevant data sets in a timely manner. Build on Data as a service (DaaS) architecture, SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment brings a lot of values for on premise as well as cloud applications. It gives frontline business users real-time access to data from external data providers using prebuilt integration with various SAP master data applications like master data governance and S/4HANA Master Data Management. Hence rather than spending time and money for master data processes, companies can benefit from ready-to-consume data from several reputed data vendors.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment

Imagine- You want to create a new master data like new business partner, customer, supplier or material. You collect all the details of master data to be created. To do that, you need to contact multiple stakeholders. Either all the stakeholders are not available in time or they don’t have information to provide in hand. Hence to collect the needed information to create a new master data, it sometimes takes several days. It’s a digital era and you can’t afford to be late in time to market.

What if someone has all the needed information for you to create a master data? What if all this information is just one click away in your enterprise application?  What if someone has spent years to collect and curate trust worthy master data and always keep it up-to-date for you? What if someone has spent enough time and resources to make sure that the curated master data is single source of truth? Wouldn’t it be amazing if such a trustworthy data can be available to you on few clicks?

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment offers you a hub of multiple commercial data providers under one single umbrella (SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment) where you can consume the data of your choice without having any trouble of negotiations and contracts with these commercial data vendors.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment Solution Overview

S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment is an interface between 3^rd party commercial data providers and enterprise applications.

S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment interfaces with external data providers like Dun & Bradstreet to get the master data, fine tune and format data for enterprise applications and interfaces with enterprise applications to pass required data to enterprise applications based on micro service architecture. S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment is SAP SCP (SAP Cloud Platform) based application in Cloud Foundry (CF) available for enterprise applications.

Accessing SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment can be accessed in two ways:

• Consumption of data cloud micro services: SAP publishes micro service to consume S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment by integrating these services with enterprise applications. Consumers can integrate these micro services with their master data applications and start using data from 3^rd party data providers
• Default integration of data cloud with SAP MDM applications: Apart from publishing micro services SAP also delivers out of the box integration of S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment with SAP MDM applications like S/4HANA MDM or SAP Master Data Governance where data stewards can just switch on ‘S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment’ functionality and can enrich their master data using standard data from 3^rd party data providers
• As part of roadmap, ‘S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment’ would be integrated with SAP Master Data Consolidation (out-of-box integration) for mass enrichment of business partner data

What does SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment Offer?

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment offers following key features apart from several other benefits:

1. Search/Match Desired Data: For a given search criteria, S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment offers search/match capability to find the desired master data from data lake (hub of multiple data providers). This feature can be integrated with any enterprise application to search the required master data from 3^rd party data sources. This feature comes as out of the box integration with SAP S/4HANA Master Data Management.
2. Getting details of searched master data: Once the matched/searched result is available, customers can get details of desired master data record into their master data system and pay only for consumed data records.
3. Configuration of Desired Master Data: While consuming a master data from 3^rd party data providers, customers may be interested only few sets of data rather than complete master data and they can configure this data using aggregated view from S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment so that customers can use limited sets of data and pay only for what they use
4. Check the data consumption: SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment enables users to check the data consumption. Customers can check how many records are consumed for a given period from a data provider, what records are consumed and when are they consumed

How to subscribe for SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment?

The biggest question is: How do I start? It’s quite simple. SAP offers ‘SAP App Center’ as a single point of access for all the customers to look for products/services offered by partners. All the 3^rd party commercial data providers like Dun & Bradstreet put their master data offerings in ‘SAP App Center’. Data Consumers can simply come to ‘SAP App Center’ online and can place an order to subscribe to consume master data from any data provider.

Once subscription is complete, the master data is available to consume. If customers are already using SAP S/4HANA Master Data Management, SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment can be enabled by doing few configurations as SAP offers default integration of data cloud with SAP S/4HANA Master Data Management else SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment services are available in the form of micro services and can be integrated with any enterprise master data application

Opportunities for whom?

There could be many companies who have a lot of finetuned data as they have been in business for years and have collected a lot of valuable data but they have no clue what to do with this data. This is because of a lot of technology changes in the market plus they don’t know who needs what data and in which format?

Hence SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment is not only opportunity for data consumers but also for data curators. As per long term roadmap of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment, SAP would have a platform for data vendors to publish and integrate their data with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment so that their data can be consumed by several enterprise applications.

Release and Availability

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment is available for customers from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition 1808. This edition brings Business Partner Master Data from Dun and Bradstreet. Integration with other data providers like Corporate Data League (CDL) for Business Partner and other domains are part of SAP roadmap.

Also, SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition 1808 release offers out-of-box integration with SAP S/4HANA Master Data Management. Integration with SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) is available from S/4HANA 1809 onwards along with roadmap to integrate data cloud with other SAP solutions including SAP Master Data Consolidation for mass enrichment of Business Partner data

Note: Terms ‘SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment’ and data cloud are interchangeably used in this document. Master Data term is sometimes used as data and it means the same in this document.

Disclaimer: This document outlines SAP general product direction and should not be relied on in making a purchase decision. This document is not subject to your license agreement or any other agreement with SAP. SAP has no obligation to pursue any course of business outlined in this document or to develop or release any functionality mentioned in this document. This document and SAP’s strategy and possible future developments are subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any time for any reason without notice. This document is provided without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. SAP assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in this document, except if such damages were caused by SAP intentionally or grossly negligent.