How does master data have duplicates

[Former Member]

Hi everybody.

We know that Using SAP MDM we can find the duplicated in master data. but How do u think we can have duplicates.

Taking an example like two products with different IDs but describes the same. something like

ID Product_Name Company

12345 Hammer abc

12346 Ham abc

the example i 've taken seems to be very simple, could anyone explain this with a good example?

Here Hammer and Ham describes the same product but with different names. But how can such a thing happen? The person who enters the data also follows a naming convention, so how is it possible that anyone can create duplicate master data?

[Mark63 · Accepted solution]

From a conceptual point of view, there is a distinction between identical data and duplicate data.

1. <u>Identical records</u> are records maintained in different application systems, but describing the same object. In heterogeneous system landscapes this happens quite often.

2. <u>Duplicate records</u> are (as you described) redundant records within one application system. This also happens quite often since it is not necessarily the case that only one person enters data according to given company standards. There are also many cases where new data needs to be entered on an ad-hoc basis because a certain business process requires immediate action.

However, if in your case, the relevant product data is entered into one system by an authorized "data steward" only, who constantly acts according to the given standards and terms you may have your master data management solution in place already.

Regards,

Markus

[Former Member]

Hi Vinod,

A good example of duplicate data which is the curse of many businesses, is customer / supplier data. In one system (say the accounting system) someone has entered "ACME Manufacturing, Inc.", while in the stock system the administrator has entered "ACME Manufacturing".

This is obviously the same company, but to "dumb" computer systems it is two totally different entities.

An even worse situation is when one system contains more than one version of the same business partner, and data is entered sometimes to one version and sometimes to the other, making analysis of business data virtually useless.

SAP MDM helps to identify these anomalies.