SAP NetWeaver MDM [EOL] Review

• The ability to push the same controlled master data to many different systems without any extra effort.
• Also, the complete audit trail during the whole product life-cycle.

• Maintaining the majority of the product master data in one single system, creating the golden record, and reducing the manual work in the receiving systems to a minimum. By interfacing the master data from SAP MDM, the data in the receiving systems are considered reliable.
• Accessing the complete product portfolio in one single place

I've used it for eight years with minor upgrades afterwards. The solution is used within a validated environment hence upgrades are a big effort due to all required testing.

During go-live the system crashed several times due to many concurrent end-users. The error had to be solved by SAP Active Global Support. The product was not stable on a Sun server environment due to the fact that SAP MDM was not a mature product eight years ago.

A lot of errors could not be solved by us and our implementation partner which forced us to not be able to go-live. SAP Active Global Support assisted with technical support but some errors had to be corrected by their developers in SAP MDM and we received new notes to be implemented. The level of support was professional but caused a big delay in the project.

SAP MDM was during this implementation a very immature software for product master data and some functions simply did not work. The pre-study and blueprint phase was very smooth but the realization phase was very challenging due to this. Most problems did not have any workaround and the only solution was to contact SAP. However, creating the database model and building workflows was very straightforward and easy.

The implementation was done together with a vendor team who assisted with the technical competence. Do not underestimate the time necessary for pre-study and creating a detailed user requirement specification, this to avoid any confusion and misunderstanding during the realization phase.

Eight years ago the license model was partly based on how many interfaces to other external systems was to be activated. This is unfortunate since the main reason for using such a system is to push the data to as many systems as possible.

Before deciding upon a standard solution we used several own-developed solutions which all had short lifecycles. The strategy for our system landscape is SAP and therefore this was the first choice.

Selecting a standard product has advantages and disadvantages. The flexibility is less then with an own-developed solution but also an advantage in the perspective that not all changes can be implemented quickly with low effort.