Create Business Partners from Reference Data with SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition
Creating master data can be a tedious and error-prone process. Plenty of information needs to be gathered, verified, and typed into applications for a new business partner. This includes data to uniquely identify a company, such as legal company name and registered address, but also identification numbers. All this master data is used by business applications and to comply with legal and fiscal regulations. Mistakes in this data may lead to severe problems in business processes and compliance issues.
The good news is that reference data for such identifying information is available from registers of public authorities, open data sources, or commercial providers. This reference data can be used to automate master data processes, leading to shorter processing times, less manual work, while increasing data quality at the same time.
Therefore, SAP Master Data Governance has been enhanced with the new Data Provider Integration capability which dramatically speeds up master data processing while increasing the data quality. As a first step, SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition 2205 offers the possibility to create business partner records from reference data provided by CDQ. CDQ provides access to data from multiple data sources at the same time. Furthermore, a Golden Record can be automatically composed out of data stemming from multiple sources. Please visit CDQ for more information.
How does it look like?
Assuming you want to use a customer in your business application but cannot find the corresponding business partner: Typically, you’d start with a search using SAP MDG’s Manage Business Partner application. If the business partner still could not be found, you would normally start with a creation process by manually entering the required information (1). Now, with SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition 2205 you can use the button Look up and Create (2).
This brings you to the application Look up Reference Data for Business Partners from where you can search for matching reference data from CDQ’s data sources. Once you have found the corresponding record, you can start the creation process using the information from the selected record (3).
Information like name, address and identification numbers are taken over to the application Manage Business Partner (4). From here, you continue the process as usual.
What do you need to get started?
The usage of data provider integration is included in the subscription of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and all existing customers can benefit from the new feature.
You need to have a contract with CDQ for accessing their API and services. Additionally, you need to have the usage rights for further data sources that are not freely available, for example commercial data providers. Please contact CDQ for more information on the available offerings.
How does the configuration work?
The integration with CDQ’s services is provided as a communication scenario of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition. All you need for configuration is to create a communication arrangement of this scenario using the access credential from your CDQ workspace.
The prerequisite is that you have created an API key for your workspace on the CDQ platform. This API key provides you with the hostname of the CDQ API endpoint, as well as client id and client secret for authentication. When creating the communication arrangement, you are asked to create a communication system. Here, you need to enter the hostname of the CDQ API endpoint.
As part of the communication system, you also create a communication user that it used to authenticate at the CDQ API endpoint. It is important to select User Name and Password as authentication method. Then, enter the client id from the CDQ API key as user name and the client secret as password.
After saving and activating the communication system and the communication arrangement the integration is ready to be used.
How to make the app available to users?
After the technical integration was set up, you still need to make the app accessible to your users. This includes making the button Look up and Create visible in the app Manage Business Partners. You perform this task by assigning the business catalog Data Provider Integration – Business Partners Display to a business role and assign that role to the business users you want to enable.
The business role template Master Data Specialist – Business Partner Data of MDG Cloud already includes this business catalog to simplify the setup.
Is there anything to consider in addition?
With the few and simple steps described above you are already good to go!
The integration of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and CDQ’s services is based on a pre-configured mapping. This mapping also includes a value mapping of code lists used by CDQ to Customizing values in your tenant of SAP Master Data Governance. In case you want to include further customizing values, for example, to cover additional legal forms or types of identification numbers, you can add these to the Customizing of your tenant. CDQ provides a content package to ease this task. This package includes files that you can simply upload to your tenant. Furthermore, CDQ offers services to adjust the mapping in case further customization is required.
For questions about SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and data provider integration, 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.
Best,
Andreas
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