A few months ago, I was running a design workshop with one of customers for their master data governance solution roll out. The company has been using a legacy MDM solution for 15 years and had now decided to move over to SAP MDG. The legacy system was built with a patch work of designs and over the last decade has become inflexible and expensive to maintain. The legacy system was a design from an era when the company just needed a place to dump their master data.

As we went through the design exercise with a room full of business process owners, it became clear that the design discussion was not going to be an easy one. The customer’s architect was trying her best to explain what collaborative data governance meant and how roles and responsibilities will change compared to a ‘’collect in a excel and dump’’ approach they were used to all these years. But the business users were struggling to get a grasp of their future data governance solution. The business owner were trying to push through with a design which was 1-1 with their existing solution.

During the coffee break, the architect remarked, ‘’ I don’t think the discussion is going in the direction we want. We are literally re-designing the to-be MDG system to mirror our legacy system’’ .  Later that day she told me, ‘’it would be so useful , if I could have a MDG system in my design workshop  with a baseline process, which I can use to show and tell how the new system will look and work’’.

Having heard similar requests from customers over the years, our team brainstormed and put together a list of ‘wishes’ we heard from customers starting their MDG journey….

We wish..

• … we could have a fully working MDG reference system during our design phase
• … we could accelerate our MDG setup and directly focus on our specific process               requirements
• … the MDG system already had business content pre-built, pre-configured and pre-delivered.
• … We could make our MDG deployment faster , cheaper and more standard

The result  of our brainstorming was the launch of our MDG Quick Start offering last month.

What is MDG Quick Start ??

The MDG Quick Start aims to speed-up the introduction of SAP Master Data Governance on S/4HANA in the enterprise organization, shortening the configuration time and delivering a preconfigured, ready-to-use MDG system.

The service offering provides a tangible support in the configuration of all standard modules of SAP Master Data Governance solution on S/4HANA, covering Master Data Consolidation, Mass Processing, Data Quality Management and Analytics including Rule Management and machine learning based Rule Mining as well as MDG-Central Governance.

The goal of this offering is not to replace the Activate methodology for the roll-out of the SAP MDG solution but rather to provide an accelerated starting point and to get the customer a fully working system in the shortest possible time fame, from which they can scale out their full implementation project.

How does it help to accelerate your MDG project??

• Fully pre-configured system based on best practices, ready to deploy
• Pre-built business content to accelerate your project
• Option to get the template deployed on your hyper-scaler environment
• Enablement of project team as part of the handover
• Possibility to use the template to kick-start your MDG journey on a temporary SAP infrastructure

What benefits do I get from MDG Quick Start??

• Better design decisions aligned to MDG best practices.
• Faster Time to Value on your MDG investment.
• Reduced Start up time and cost during your MDG Project
• Reduced effort in design, development and test phase of your MDG Project
• Overall shortened project timeline

                        MDG Quick Start : Scope and Architecture Coverage

What scope does MDG Quick Start cover?

The scope covers all the 4 different MDG solutions viz Governance, Consolidation, Mass Processing and Data Quality Management for all standard domains of MDG including Supplier, Customer, Finance and Material master.

MDG Quick Start provides deployment options for both the ‘Hub’ customers and ‘Co-deploy’ customer installations. The scope of the business content in both options is the same but the deployment approach and timeline are different due to the nature of environments. Green field based HUB deployments are obviously faster since they can be fully delivered as a template, compared to a brownfield based environment where the quick start content has to be more diligently configured, keeping in mind the existing configuration of the system.

What does MDG Quick Start contain?

• Prebuilt business content – including baseline content for all MDG domains and solutions. Additional content per domain including additional rules, validations, business content, workflows, process templates etc.
• User Interface – Fully configured Fiori based interfaces including data processing screens and data analytics Fiori tiles.
• Documentation – Complete documentation for both standard content and additional business content
• Delivery and Handover – Includes several hours of walkthrough of the Quick Start system with the SAP expert including Q&A . Optionally includes data loading and setup for consolidation.

MDG Quick Start Deployment Options

In general the recommendation to  all customers is to start their MDG journey leveraging the Quick Start to derive maximum value from their MDG investments.

For more information, on the Quick Start offering and how you can accelerate your MDG implementations, do reach out to your SAP contact. And watch out this space, as we plan to bring out more pre-configured, value adding content in the forthcoming releases of the Quick Start offering.

Do Like, Share and post your comments. Feel free to reach out to me directly, If you have more queries or would like to see additional business content being part of the quick start offering in the future.