Challenges in SAP Material Master and how to deal with them.

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

This is the first reason why we decided to stop the standard and traditional SAP consulting services and make spin off in our business to focus on addressing these common challenges to all SAP companies, through an easy-to-deploy and work-for-all solution.

Now, if you can´t wait, you can go straight to SiDM Materials site, but before you fall in love with our app, let us go formal and let me show you the structured list of issues we find as the common errors or challenges in Material Master in every company and the general approach to address them, and I will complement with the good approach that Anjali More add in her article A Comprehensive Guide to Master Data in SAP MM:

Main challenges in Material Master Data in SAP:

1      Wrong data:

1.1        The naïve error,

Just the material group that was deleted, or unit of measure that doesn´t exist, not a big problem, but are minutes of rework, especially when you deal with out-of-date Excel templates.

1.2        The complex error,

When SAP lets you create, a material called “Lubricating Oil” but you mistakenly set the unit of measure to “inches” instead of gallons or barrels. This is riskier because it may pass under the radar until it becomes a big problem if you already have stock or define 10 USD by ml instead of 10 USD by gallon.

Other common big problem that was created with wrong data is wrong reports, like when a user set a wrong valuation class and the inventory asset account in the P&L is wrong because the value of the row material account includes the value of a high-cost spare part.

Solution Approach: Must be Business rules, sometimes mean formulas in an Excel template, custom validation programs in SAP, or just a PDF manual for the user to follow step by step.

2      Incomplete Data – Data gaps:

Often a waste of support time, causing delays in invoicing or creating purchase orders because a material was not extended to a plant or missing the purchasing view.

Forget about alternative units of measure, forget about tax classifications, all those things where SAP lets you create an incomplete material, but then hits you with error messages at the very moment you need it.

Solution Approach: Again, business rules are needed to define all the views you need for each scenario, but there are different approaches, often red scandal cells in Excel to warn users about the required views, or checklists in documents. In this case is more difficult to use custom programs in SAP or it means too much personalized, low-scalable and low-flexible solutions.

3      Data Governance – Centralized / decentralized processes

Who needs to make the requests? Who should validate?  Who should create the material? And how to do it on time?

In most cases, different departments are responsible for part of the data, like purchasing departments create purchasing view, logistic create MRP data, finance the accounting views and so on. Sometimes in parallel, sometimes in line with dependencies.

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

Solution Approach: Workflows are clearly the solution, but what tools do they require? The most common: a living template dancing back and forth between different inboxes, sometimes in a meticulous order, sometimes in a chaotic sequence that takes days to create a “mouse” for the laptops of the accounting department. It is sad.

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

4      Duplicate data – the silent danger

The problem is clear: a unique SKU created in SAP 2 or more times by mistake, in the best case only wasting time to identify and block the duplicate, in the worst-case duplicating purchasing, inventory and ultimately costs.

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

Solution Approach: Here are some ways to attend the challenge:

4.1        Based on Material Description (Short Text)

One of the most common requests from clients and one of the most difficult to solve. You can use the cutting-edge technology like AI, and I still think that the human validation is needed, and here our common example of the difficulty of this challenge:

Case 1: No duplicated data.

Material Number	Description
A0001	Stainless Steel Screws 3 Inch x 100 pieces
A0002	Stainless Steel Screws 4 Inch x 100 pieces

Case 2: Duplicated data.

Material Number	Description
A0003	Stainless Steel 2”
A0004	Screws of 2 inches in Stainless Steel

In Case 1, the SKUs are 3 and 4 inches screws, so it’s OK. No duplicate data.

In Case 2, the lengths are different and there is little overlap, but the SKUs are the same. It’s duplicated data.

4.2        Based on key fields

This approach is truly accurate and easy to identify at the outset, in the creation process, or later for existing materials. Here are recommended fields such as “EAN” or “Manufacturer Part Number”.

A common mistake is to apply this approach, but using fields that are not from basic data. This is not ok, because these are fields that depend on different organizational units, so, can have different values for the same material, so totally wrong.

4.3        Based on Classification Characteristics

This could be even more accurate, and is appropriate for spare parts, because you can identify duplicates with a list of specific attributes, regardless of whether the materials have the same description, EAN, or MPN. For example, if a user creates an “electric motor”, then they need to set characteristics such as

Manufacturer

Reference

Input voltage

Synchronous/Asynchronous

Horsepower

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 strong and controlled creation process, it is virtually impossible to have an error-free material master. Even if we assume that, companies are living animals that grow, change, have new scenarios, and it is common 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 can have an open door in bulk changes to all the previous mistakes (incomplete or wrong data), so it is important to have tools to control the maintenance the same as the creation.

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

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

6      Integration

There are scenarios where companies need to share material master data in SAP with other systems, and sometimes the material creation process starts 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 must be the center of your landscape, at least as far as master data is concerned.

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

If you need to start the process in an external system, try to identify the minimal data you need to share with that system, create a proper mapping of fields, and ideally get just basic data to complete the rest of the material data in SAP, considering business rules and workflows as we talked about before.

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

Time for SiDM Materials

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

Let me explain you in a nutshell, in a chart, easy as we want to make your SAP processes, how to address all the Material Master Data challenges:

Challenge	Feature / Solution
Wrong Data	SiDM Materials has field rules that don’t require SAP or technical expertise or coding. 100% end-user functionality to automatically fill in the values your business needs and maintain standard validations such as mandatory fields, existing values, and even user permissions.
Incomplete Data	Business rules for views and organizational units, not only to ensure that materials are created correctly, but also to check and correct existing incomplete data.
Data governance	Workflows, with the flexibility to define: –        Different workflows for different scenarios –        Multiple levels/responsibles –        In line or in parallel –        Specify the fields that each responsible needs to complete or just approve. –        Who is responsible for creation –        And even more, to define responsible for additional data such as  BOM or routes.
Duplicate Data	SiDM Material covers the three approaches: – Based on text (multilingual, short text, long text, PO text) – Based on key fields (such as EAN or MPN) – Based on classification features Identify and validate in the creation process and identify and correct existing duplicate materials.
Maintenance	Multiple tools to bulk changes, based on business rules, based on reference materials, manually. Identify specific materials that don’t comply with rules. Identify and extend incomplete materials with all the validations. Correct, standardize or complete texts in multiple languages.

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