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Accelerating Bekaert’s MDG landscape with Alluvion’s MPP 

Bekaert, the steel wiring giant  

Founded in 1880 in Zwevegem (Belgium), Bekaert is a global market and technology leader in steel wire manufacturing, transformation and coating technologies. Listed on Euronext Brussels (BEKB), the company brings together a bit less than 25000 people worldwide.  

Bekaert products show up almost everywhere, in cars, trains, tracks, trucks, elevators, mines, bridges, tunnels, agriculture, construction, and increasingly in new mobility, low-carbon construction and green energy. 

The challenges  

Running master data at that scale is a serious undertaking. With operations spread across dozens of countries and a steady flow of new customers, suppliers and materials, Bekaert needed a robust and well-defined Master Data infrastructure that could properly translate the company’s needs in terms of data governance.  

Like many large, international organizations, Bekaert had already invested in SAP MDG, but the current governance process carried a familiar set of frictions: 

  • Limited user knowledge of SAP MDG  

  • High volume of business rules and functional requirements  

  • Unclear approval chains  

  • Low transparency and ownership 

Since Bekaert was preparing their brownfield conversion from ECC to S/4HANA, this was the opportunity to overcome these obstacles once and for all.  

The solution  

During some initial discussions, Alluvion demonstrated how these challenges could be tackled with multiple functionalities implemented in our Alluvion SAP MDG Productivity Pack (MPP). 

The MPP adds value to SAP MDG in two ways. The first one is by moving the governance logic, such as validation and derivation logic, and similar business rules, towards SAP’s BRF+ framework. Doing so, hundreds of rules were implemented to handle Bekaert’s big set of functional requirements, while keeping it all easy to maintain for trained data stewards.  

The second element where the MPP boosts the MDG landscape is by providing a set of new quality of life (QoL) features. Just to name a few:  

  • F4 Value List Filtering 

  • Based on the Business Partner/Material data, it is now possible to include/exclude values within the search help of a particular field on the UI. (E.g.: Tax Number Category when BP Country is set to ‘BE’) 

SAP standard behavior 

Alluvion MPP 

 

 

  • E-mail notifications about the Change Request status  

  • The notification framework is configured in the Alluvion MPP as a mechanism to notify stakeholders via email about a certain action or state that has happened to the Change Request (Notification of State).  

  • This is an additional feature on top of SAP’s standard “Notification of Work”, which can be configured to notify end users that they have work to do in SAP MDG 

  • E.g.: Notification to the requestor about a Change Request’s activation 

 

  • Checklist with Post-Processing activities:  

  • The MPP checklist helps steering Bekaert’s governance flow by enforcing the requestor and/or approver to complete their respective tasks mentioned in the list.  

  • The Post-Processing flow was implemented to enable the change request processor to perform activities outside of SAP MDG. It supports the automatic creation of a follow-up change request once the preceding change request has been activated. These post-processing activities can be executed through embedded checklist URLs. Within the MPP, checklist items contain links that direct users to external websites, SAP Fiori applications or SAP GUI transactions, providing a seamless transition between SAP MDG and external processes. 

 

  • Data-Driven Workflow Determination  

  • Depending on certain condition fields, the MPP allows you to easily set the approver of a Change Request in a dynamic way after submission. Standard SAP MDG processes only allow predefined workflows and corresponding approvers. However, Bekaert wanted to use their specific custom field ‘Product Type’ to dynamically determine the next processor of a Change Request. 

 

 

  • Automated Workflow Approvals 

  • A flexible workflow has been implemented in the MPP to validate if a specific characteristic is enabled for a material in a Change Request. If so, the Change Request does not require approval from the Master Data Team and is automatically activated: 

 

How Alluvion implemented the solution  

The first goal at Bekaert was to ensure the master data team could configure and maintain the MPP features using the BRF+ framework. Through a combination of hands-on training sessions and comprehensive documentation, the team gained the knowledge and confidence to manage the solution independently.  

During the implementation, this knowledge enabled us to define more than 2000 business rules, including derivations, field properties, and F4 value help filters. Because the team understood the Alluvion MPP framework, maintaining and extending these rules became much easier after go-live. 

With the governance logic firmly in place, more advanced MPP capabilities could be leveraged to further streamline and automate key business processes. The result was a significantly improved user experience and more efficient governance through:  

  • Clear ownership of tasks through checklist items and automated email notifications. 

  • Flexible workflows that route work items to the right teams and automatically approve requests when predefined conditions are met. 

  • Automatic creation of follow-up Change Requests where needed, reducing manual effort and improving process consistency. 

Conclusion  

Bekaert successfully went live with the Alluvion MPP at the end of May, and the solution is now up and running in production with all the implemented enhancements. As with any successful implementation, the work does not stop at go-live. Together, opportunities to further optimize the solution will be identified to support Bekaert's evolving business processes. 

This project shows how the MPP can build on an existing SAP MDG environment to simplify governance, improve data quality, and give business users greater control over their master data. 

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