Using SAP MDM 7.1 effectively and effeciently vinay swarup

Using SAP MDM 7.1 effectively and effeciently
vinay swarup



It is no more a hot news as what all is new in SAP MDM 7.1.Everyone interested in SAP MDM must have been aware of it by now. This blog mainly aims at discussing those features and their possible use .This is only my idea of representation and suggestion.

Well to begin with the most important feature ---having Multiple main tables. Wow! what important use it can be of !Many times in real life scenarios we need to share master data across different loosely or tightly coupled objects like Customer and Vendor ,Products and material as per the business needs .Now when one has actually finished modeling for Vendor and has a model for customer in pipeline ,he can reuse the vendor model by simply adding one more main table with name customer. In this case all the common tables supplying information like regions ,Countries ,Taxes etc. Also feather in the cap is these two main tables can actually talk to each other with new Lookup type Lookup[main].There are vendors who are also customers to an organization and this scenario can now be modeled better. Other complex and untraditional objects say Bank can now have relational data modeling .egs Bank might have several schemes modeled as product and it can be linked to customers in one repository only. So far so good .But some cautions should be kept in mind before actually freezing the modeling in such typical cases.

According to me following points might be worth giving a thought

a)How much reusability is there? Are objects defined as main tables in one repository well coupled and other supporting data tables can be reused effectively? Also how much efforts are saved?

b)Most importantly How bulky would repository be ?Overloading a repository with tables would result in bad performance especially while creating a record from portal, loading and unloading, searching for a record etc.So be careful while making your final call and justify your need

c) Suppose I have customer and vendor as two main tables in a single repository and I have two portal use cases for each object (customer and vendor) .But downloading a repository for any table would stop the portal working for another table .This means although my one object has no problem , it still suffers a downtime because of other object as complete repository is down .

Now coming to next feature --Introduction of Tuple. This data structure can be a dark horse as what MDM was missing was defining complex data structure by reusing the already created fields. Again only challenge is to first justify your need for tuple creation as it is a complex data structure and is proportionally connected to repository’s performance

Next comes trusted connections--Although they were launched before but MDM Standard iviews did not support trusted connection(correct me if I am wrong).I hope this is resolved as this can be helpful and we can get rid of storing passwords while transporting contents from one environment to another.

To move ahead transportation of MDM objects are better and now you can see your validations ,expressions and workflows getting transported as well .CTS+ promises to transport MDM contents .Again a welcome move from SAP.

Last but not the least SAP has promised considerable performance from repository as the downtime is reduced and online activities list has been appended.

So let's wait and watch this much awaited blue eyed product

vinay swarup is a Netweaver MDM EP Consultant with Accenture Services