Challenges in the SAP Materials Master and how to address them.

SAP’s Material Master is where the entire supply chain is born. And where it starts to die when things go wrong.

This is the first reason why we decided to set aside the traditional SAP consulting services and to spin off a spin off on our business to focus on addressing these challenges common to all SAP companies, through a solution that is easy to implement and works for everyone.

Now, if you don’t want to wait, you can go directly to the site of SiDM Materialsbut before you fall in love with our application, let’s go formal and let me show you the structured list we have found of common mistakes or challenges in the Material Master in different companies, and the general approach to address them, and I will complement it with the good approach that Anjali More adds in her article on SiDM Materials. companies, and the general approach to address them, and I will complement it with the good approach that Anjali More adds in her article A Complete Guide to Master Data in SAP MM.:

Main challenges of material master data in SAP:

1 Wrong data:

1.1 The naive error,

Just the item group that has been removed, or the unit of measure that does not exist, is not a big deal, but it is minutes of rework, especially when dealing with outdated Excel templates.

1.2 The complex error,

When SAP allows you to create, a material called “Lubricating Oil” but by mistake you set the unit of measure in “inches” instead of liters or barrels. This is more risky because it can go unnoticed until it becomes a big problem if you already have stock or define a price of $10 per ml instead of $10 per gallon.

Another common major problem that exists with erroneous data is erroneous reporting, such as when a user sets up the wrong valuation category and the inventory asset account on a financial report is erroneous because the value of the raw material account includes the value of a high-cost spare part.

Solution approach: Business rules, sometimes meaning formulas in an Excel template, non-standard validation programs in SAP, or simply a PDF manual for the user to follow step by step.

2 Incomplete data:

It is often a waste of support time, causing delays in invoicing or in the creation of purchase orders because a material has not been extended to a plant or the purchase view is missing.

Forgetting alternative units of measure, or tax classifications, are cases where SAP allows you to create incomplete material, but then charges you dearly with error messages just at the time of most urgency.

Solution approach: Again, business rules are needed, in this case to define all the views that are needed for each scenario and organizational units, but there are different approaches, often shocking red cells in Excel templates to warn users about the required views, or checklists in documents. In this case it is more difficult to use custom programs in SAP or it means solutions that are too customized, not scalable and not flexible enough.

3 Data Governance – Centralized / Decentralized Processes

Who should make the requests? Who should validate them? Who should create the material? And how to do it in time?

In most cases, different departments are responsible for part of the data, such as purchasing departments create the purchasing view, logistics creates the MRP data, finance creates the accounting views, and so on. Sometimes in parallel, sometimes depending on dependencies.

But how to involve all these people without it becoming a bureaucratic and inefficient process that sometimes ends up excluding users or creating delays in the supply chain.

Solution focus: Workflows are clearly the solution, but what tools do they require? Most common: a live template that goes back and forth between different inboxes, sometimes in meticulous order, sometimes in a chaotic sequence that takes days to create a “mouse” for the accounting department’s laptops. It’s sad.

Other solutions are external applications, such as forms in SharePoint, or custom software that ends up in a template that the user must load into an LSMW or a non-standard program with iterations of manual file corrections.

4 Duplicate data: the silent danger

The problem is clear: a single SKU created in SAP 2 or more times by mistake, at best only time is lost to identify and block the duplicate, at worst duplicate purchases, inventory and ultimately costs.

But here I want to go deeper into the solution approaches, because they are not as obvious as the previous ones.

Solution approach: Here are some ways to address the challenge:

4.1 Based on the description of the material (short text)

One of the most common customer requests and one of the most difficult to solve. You can use the most advanced technology such as AI, but I am of the opinion that human validation is necessary, and here our common example of the difficulty of this challenge:

Case 1: No duplicate data.

Case 2: Duplicate data.

In case 1, the SKUs are 3-inch and 4-inch screws, so that’s fine. There is no duplicate data.

In case 2, the text lengths are different, there are few matches, but the references are the same. They are duplicate data.

4.2 Based on key fields

This approach is really accurate and easy to identify early on, in the creation process, or later for existing materials. Fields such as “EAN” or “Manufacturer’s part number” are recommended here.

A common mistake is to apply this approach, but using fields that are not from the basic data view. This is not right, because they may be fields that depend on different organizational units, therefore, they may have different values for the same material, so it would be a wrong approach.

4.3 Based on classification characteristics

This could be even more accurate, and is appropriate for spare or replacement parts, because duplicates can be identified with a list of specific attributes, regardless of whether the materials have the same description, EAN or manufacturer part number. For example, if a user creates an “electric motor”, he or she should set characteristics such as

Manufacturer

Reference

Input voltage

Synchronous/Asynchronous

Power

RPM’s

On the other hand, as you can imagine, this requires military discipline and is difficult to implement in a material master that already has thousands of records.

5 Maintenance

Even if your company has a solid and controlled creation process, it is practically impossible to have an error-free material master. Even if we assume so, companies are living animals, they grow, change, have new scenarios, and it is usual that new projects bring new requirements to modify thousands of materials in a specific field, or change values, or extend to new organizational units.

Perhaps the company has a strong filter in the creation process, but may have an open door in mass changes to all previous errors (incomplete or erroneous data), so it is important to have tools to control maintenance as well as creation.

Solution approach: Typically the solution is the same, non-standard templates and programs in SAP, but often with less validation or governance.

The proper approach, regardless of the technical solution, is to ensure the application of business rules to reduce incorrect and incomplete data.

6 Integration

There are situations where companies need to share material master data in SAP with other systems, and sometimes the material creation process is initiated in external systems.

In my opinion, it is important to assume that if SAP is YOUR ERP, where you run your processes (finance, operations, sales), it should be the center of your landscape, at least as far as master data is concerned.

Therefore, it is convenient to start in SAP, create the right data and only then trigger events to consume API’s or web services to replicate the data you need in other systems.

If you need to initiate the process in an external system, try to identify the minimum data you need to share with that system, define an appropriate field mapping and, ideally, obtain only the minimum data needed from the external system, to complete the rest of the material data in SAP, taking into account the business rules and workflows we discussed earlier.

As for the solution approach, in this case, sorry, but there is no escpe, custom integrations need to be developed, don’t expect a magic answer.

It’s time for SiDM Materials

Now, I think we deserve your attention for a few more lines, and possibly, your love for our SiDM Materials solution.

Let me explain in a few words, in a graphic, easy as we want your SAP processes to be, how to address all the challenges of Material Master Data:

Now, I know we’ve gone straight to your heart, so…if you want to see how the magic happens, or if you want to bring the magic to your users: