One of the first differences between the SAP Material Master in an ECC or S/4 HANA systems and a in SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) that one notices is the number of entities in MDG compared to the views in the classic ECC or S/4 HANA systems. What used to be approximately 20 views in ECC or S/4 HANA becomes over 40 different entities in the MDG System.
As striking as that difference is, once you begin working with the MDG “version” of the SAP Material Master, you begin to see that it becomes much easier to customize access to specific areas of the material master because of those entities. Hence, the user experience can be much more tailored to specific functional roles that the users perform during the creation and modification of the material master data.
Another area in which differences are clearly noticed is the way additional organizational units such as Sales Areas, Plants, Storage Locations, and Warehouses are entered and maintained. In classic ECC and S/4 HANA, these units are entered one at a time through a “create” material process which extends the relevant material to these units. In the MDG system, these units can all be entered concurrently in a single transaction. This can result in a significant savings of time in the entry and maintenance processes.
A third difference in the Material Master between classic ECC and S/4 HANA and MDG is the ability to save an MDG change request in draft status at any point in the entry process. If you end up in the situation where you are missing a key piece of data, such as a required field whose value may not yet be in the check table or domain value list, in ECC or S/4 HANA you have the option of entering “something” into the field so that the record will be saved – with invalid or erroneous data – or you roll back the entire entry/maintenance process, losing everything that had been done up to that point.
Conversely, in MDG you can save the change request you are working on in draft status, which keeps the material in the staging area of the MDG system and out of the backend system, until you have the data that you are missing, (e.g. the appropriate check table or domain value list has been updated). This allows you to come back to the material later to continue and complete the entry of the material data (from the point at which you left it) thus enabling you to maintain the integrity of the material master in the backend system.
