What are my options regarding Master Data Analytics?

Strengthening Our Decisions

The uncertainty of our current times has led executives and management to seek ways to strengthen their decision-making process. As a result, many are moving away from a linear approach and towards an augmented form of working.

In the past, decision-making relied on analytical reports created by IT and business analysts but now there is an increasing push for everyone in the organization to be able to create those reports. This change is driven by the growing complexity of business processes and changing requirements. Users need to be able to generate insights in the context of the business processes they are involved in.

Decision-making is a continuous process in every organization. Every day, most employees try to take the right actions based on the insights they have collected. However, in many organizations, the activities involved in decision-making are distributed and disconnected. If these activities were connected and supported by technology, organizations could reap many benefits.

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

This is where SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) comes into the picture, this service connects all these different activities required for continuous decision-making and provides embedded AI capabilities. A key benefit of SAC is that it supports the Cloud first strategy of SAP and has shorter implementation cycles, compared to traditional on-premise implementations.

What is SAP MDG Process Analytics? 

In order to convert master data process insight into action for the SAP Master Data Governance (SAP MDG) product, SAP has provided the SAP MDG Process Analytics (MDG PA) framework.

SAP MDG PA contains two types of process analytics:

1. Master Data process analytics

2. Master Data process analytics including master data attributes

In “Master Data process analytics” (since SAP S/4HANA 1809), overview pages have been made available to provide a summary of relevant process information. For example, the amount of rejected Change Requests, Longest Running Open Change Requests, Processing Duration of Finalized Change Requests, and others. Next to this Central Governance analytics, it is possible to show analytics for Mass Processing and Consolidation. To have a more detailed look at the analytics, there are also analytical list pages where filters or drill-downs can be used. From those, it is possible to navigate to a change request or process.

With “Master Data process analytics including master data attributes” (since SAP S/4HANA 2020), a new process analytics function has been included in SAP MDG making it possible to build KPI applications that show us analytics regarding Change Requests in combination with master data. For example, how many Change Requests have a specific status for a particular material plant, … This kind of information can then be visualized via drill-down reports.

Compare

Both SAC and MDG PA have their advantages. Underneath we will compare both offerings:

Conclusion

If your analytical requirements are limited to SAP MDG process data, we recommend using the MDG Process Analytics functionality. SAP provides several Fiori analytics applications with little to no installation effort.

The learning curve for the process analytics functionalities and features is less steep than that for SAP Analytics Cloud. This also makes it more accessible to business users.

On the other hand, if you are already using SAP Analytics Cloud, consider using it to analyze your SAP MDG processes. This will help you keep the overall view of your analytics in one place. You will also not be limited to one data source since master data (processes) can be combined with other relevant data (ex. transactional documents).

Early investments into MDG PA are not necessarily lost: Your custom-created MDG PA applications can be exposed as OData services, which can be used to create custom SAC stories. Also, from SAP MDG on S/4HANA 2020, an out-of-the-box integration scenario with SAP MDG Data Quality Management (MDG DQM) and SAC is available.

The best solution will, of course, vary depending on your scenario and your context. We hope to have provided some insights into the different options and what you can do with them. Please keep checking our website for upcoming customer cases around PA & SAC.