Table of Contents
The general misconception is that master data management is primarily about loading core master data into business systems, such as ERP. Reality is altogether different and often resembles the picture below to create new Finished Good materials.
End-to-End Business Process for Material Master (New Product) Creation
The overall scope or material master creation process is significant and cross-functional, and includes many of the activities and master data elements listed below.
- Get Material Number (can be based on internal sequences or intelligent part numbering schemes)
- Create preliminary information (in SAP it would be Basic View)
- Block material (so that material cannot be used until it is ready)
- Get UPC/GTIN codes
- Collect information on planning/finance/logistics/purchasing/MRP/production planning/costing/sales and distribution.
- Packaging related information (Units of Measure information)
- Manufacturing planning (Internal manufacturing/Co-manufacturing/copacking)
- Logistics planning (distribution centers, transportation lanes)
- Extending material to different plants/storage locations/warehouses/ sales areas
- Designing and creating Bills of Material (BOM)
- Designing and creating Recipes
- Creating Routing information
- Production version setup for different plants
- Specifications
- EHS and Compliance information
- Characteristics (for batches and other purposes)
- Hierarchy Information
- Pricing conditions
- Unblocking the material for use (this last step is when the material is available for use)
Business Process-centric MDM vs ERP-centric MDM vs Data-centric MDM
The picture below compares a Business Process-centric MDM approach to ERP-centric MDM (SAP MDG, for example) and Data-centric MDM (Informatica). With ERP-centric and data-centric master data approaches, most of the business process is not supported.
Traditional MDM solutions don’t or can’t support the end-to-end process
It is unfortunate and true. Some of our customers have spent exorbitant money and time on ERP-centric and data-centric MDM solutions to support one to two preliminary activities of the overall end-to-end processes and leave the rest of the process to manual and ad hoc approaches.