SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition: Getting Hands-on Experience on a Guided Tour

This year’s SAP TechEd participants had the opportunity to try out SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition in a hands-on session, which was very well received. The session was scheduled twice and due to the strong interest both slots were heavily overbooked. To make up for this, we are making the contents of this session available to you in the form of a guided tour through the basic features of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition.

Credit goes to Andreas Seifried and team who made this all possible.

Feel free to take the tour to get a hands-on understanding of capabilities like consolidation, central governance and data quality management for business partner master data, and to see how easy it is to set up and use this Software-as-a-Service solution on the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Business Context

SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition is an optional deployment: As an SaaS solution, it can be deployed as a stand-alone solution to kick-start an enterprise MDG initiative at low entry barriers (which includes the option to adapt the solution to federated governance use cases according to the business units’ demand), or you can leverage earlier investments in SAP Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA and transfer them into a federated deployment to broaden the scope and ease the implementation. This means that you have the option to expand from centralized master data governance to a modular, de-centralized set-up for federated master data governance.

​For more information about SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and the concept of federated governance, see my recent blog post Paving the Way Towards Federated Master Data Governance, or watch the replay of the related SAP TechEd lecture.

Prerequisites

For the guided tour, you need a trial account for SAP Business Technology Platform. But don’t worry if you don’t have it yet – it is part of the first exercise to create such an account (see the description below).

Scope

The trial version is not meant to have the full scope of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition. As pointed out before, it concentrates on processes in consolidation, central governance and data quality management. Capabilities like for example field extensibility or data replication are not included in the trial scope. See also the scope comparison between trial version and full version.

Exercises

Exercise 1 – Getting a BTP Trial Account and Subscribing to MDG Cloud

Open the Getting Started Guide for the Trial Version of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and carry out all activities, such as registering for the trial as described in the document. For a PDF version of this guide, use the download link provided on that page. You do not need to read the complete document. Once you can launch the apps displayed on your user’s Fiori Launchpad like displayed on the left, you are ready to start with the next exercise

Your trial subscription to MDG, cloud edition remains valid for 30 days. After that, you can delete the subscription and create a new subscription to start a new trial period. Note that by deleting a subscription you will lose access to all data created.

Exercise 2 – Central Governance

In this exercise, you will learn the basics of working with the central governance capabilities of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition. In step 1, you start with creating a business partner. Then you carry out a duplicate check to see if there is potentially redundant data in the system. You create a business partner with various data sets, such as address, role, bank data, and identification. Then you submit your request for approval. For the approval step, you switch roles. Once your request is approved, you will receive an email notification. You can then change the business partner.

The exercise is split in 3 steps based on the detailed step-by-step description: Step 1: Create Business Partner Step 2: Approve Business Partner Step 3: Change Business Partner

Exercise 3 – Consolidation

The exercise is split in 2 steps based on the detailed step-by-step description: Step 1: Import Spreadsheet File Upload a spreadsheet with customer information Step 2: Run Consolidation Process After an initial check, you make some manual changes, before running the matching step to identify duplicates. After the match review, the best record calculation will merge the data of a match group. The validation and activation step will bring the loaded data into the system. After finalizing the process, you can check all actions of this process using the audit trail functionality.

Exercise 4 – Mass Change

In this exercise, you will learn the basics of working with the mass change capabilities of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition. You start with the creation of a mass request, which can be used to perform all required changes for selected business partners. You submit the request, and, as an approver, will get a workflow task to approve the changes. After the approval, the requestor receives an email notification with a link to the result of this mass request.

The exercise is split in 2 steps based on the detailed step-by-step description: Step 1: Create Mass Request Your task is to define a new search term for all business partners of ABC companies. For a mass change of business partner data, you have to create a request. With this request,  you macan ke the changes, and submitting this request creates a workflow task for the approver. Step 2: Approve Mass Request In this exercise you act both as requestor and approver of a mass request. You receive a workflow task to approve a mass request. In your workflow inbox, you can check the changed business partners and approve the request. As the requestor, you will receive an email notification to navigate to the finalized request.

Exercise 5 – Data Quality Management

In this exercise you explore some of the features of master data quality management in SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition. You will see how data quality rules for validation of master data are managed and how you can control their usage in master data processes. You analyze the results of a data quality evaluation and see how you can remediate detected errors.

The exercise is split in 3 steps based on the detailed step-by-step description: Step 1: Examine validation rules You examine the sample rules provided with your trial account. Note that these are simple examples that were created for demo purposes. In the trial version you can neither edit these rules, examine their implementation in BRFplus, nor create new rules. Step 2: Analyze the evaluation results of a relevant rule  Step 3: Correct the errors found for the rule

In a Nutshell…

For questions or for reporting an issue, please use our discussion forum in the SAP Community, and feel free to give us your feedback by commenting on this blog post.

To stay up to date with what’s going on in master data management and governance, simply follow the SAP Community Topic Page for SAP Master Data Governance.

Make sure to get on the tour. You can warm up right away with the Angry Data game:

Best,

Markus