What’s the purpose of master data? It is maintained to support your company’s business processes. It needs to be available just in time in high quality when any relevant business process relies on that data. A master data management system like SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) ensures a high level of data quality. Processes, business rules and a dynamic user interface ensure data is entered the first time right and is ready for process usage.
But often the integration into business processes that need master data is lacking. This is what we focus on: a full integration of master data processes to the transactional workflows used in daily business requiring high-quality master data. In this article we outline the process with the Camelot solution for an end-to-end master data process integration.
The Process
One example for this challenge is the invoicing process. When an invoice is issued to your company, the data supplied is matched to a vendor master record. Sometimes, the vendor master does not yet exist or has missing information such as a new bank account.
In a classical scenario the user needs to login to the master data management system, maintain the missing information, send the request to an approval process, and continue his invoicing process after final approval.
Subsequently, the employee needs to do the operational work in two different systems. Or even worse: The employee drops an e-mail to the master data department, who would pick up the request after a certain amount of time, maintain the data and hopefully send a response back to continue the original tasks. In both scenarios this means a lack of integration and unsatisfying user experience.
Camelot’s End-2-End Master Data Process Integration
We propose a solution to fully integrate the master data process into the desired business process: Camelot’s End-to-End Master Data Process Integration.
In this scenario, after the user realized that information is missing or not up to date, he would simply click a button and the system would create a respective MDG Change Request for the existing record or start a creation for a new master record. The user would then be able to enter the required data and submit the Change Request.
But that is just the starting point.
The status of the master data process can be integrated into the operations process overview. Doing that a user would not need to check the master data system for a status update anymore but would see it integrated in the inbox of the business process tasks.
And even more: after the final approval of the master data process, the business process can proceed automatically without any user interaction.
What’s the Benefit?
Camelot’s End-to-End Master Data Process Integration brings business processes and master data even closer together. It ensures that a creation or change of master data can be triggered from any business process, assuring the maintenance processes and rules defined in your master data system are adhered.
Furthermore, transparency within your business processes for handling data is achieved.
With Camelot’s solution the efficiency of your business processes in regards of data is significantly increased and provides a better user experience for your process experts. Overall, that is a win-win situation from a process cost and useability perspective.
How it works
Camelot’s solution is based on a flexible framework implemented in SAP MDG which allows you to send requests in real time to your master data system by any business process. Furthermore, the solution provides a dynamic option to send feedbacks to the business process in case of required status updates or actions to be triggered automatically.
Camelot developed a template solution which is easily adaptable to your specific needs for any business processes you would like to integrate. These speeds up the time to production and reduces implementation costs.
Not convinced yet?
This solution can easily be combined with other innovative solutions offered by Camelot. If you use Camelot’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract information from paper-based invoices, you would be able to transfer the necessary data to the master data maintenance to achieve an even higher automation.
You do not have an OCR solution in place yet? Check out our blog post here.
If you’re interested to know more, do not hesitate to contact Thomas Tolksdorf (tto@camelot-itlab.com) or Daniel Seel (dsee@camelot-itlab.com) to learn more about our ideas and solutions regarding end-to-end master data process integration.
