The current industry focus on master data management (MDM) creates the impression that MDM is a brand new technology, but this not the case. Companies have been building their own custom-built business transaction (BTx) solutions for managing operational master data for many years, and business intelligence (BI) applications and their underlying data warehouses have been providing a single view of key master data entitles such as customers and products for analytical purposes for some time.

This paper reviews the current status of MDM, and offers suggestions for planning, building and deploying an MDM environment. The paper proposes an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach to MDM, and examines how the MDM environment can be used in conjunction with BI applications and an underlying data warehousing environment to improve the decision making process. It also presents an overview of the SAP MDM solution and how it supports many of the ideas presented in this paper.

SAP master data management is a component of SAP's NetWeaver application platform, which provides a complete environment for designing, building, integrating and deploying business processes. SAP NetWeaver provides the technology foundation for SAP, SAP partner and custom-built applications.