The Magic of Data Enrichment
Busy and Boring!
We are living in a very busy world, where people are on the move and tend to often use mobile apps on the go.
Let’s say a salesperson has finished a business deal and wants to raise an invoice, he/she would use the mobile app to onboard basic info of customer and call back office to create an invoice for the customer.
Filling forms is just so boring!
There’s a high chance that the salesperson would have made few typos, maybe a few incorrect values and in fact might have missed a few important fields!
Nobody wants to do this on purpose, but the fact is that distractions around you will grab your attention whether you like it or not… It just happens…
You can’t do big things if you are distracted by little things.
You can either enforce more guidelines/rules across your company to ensure good quality Master Data (customer info, etc.), Or you can be smart and leverage technology to solve this problem! 😊
Imagine the impossible — its possible!!
High-quality master data can make a HUGE difference in your company.
Imagine your sales team powered with the latest info to tune their sales outreach. Extremely helpful in Product/Market-fit and Customer Segmentation.
Imagine an easy way to generate new high-quality sales leads!
Imagine empowering your teams in generating high-quality invoices with rich, complete and accurate address info.
Imagine not having to send a fax to incorrect fax IDs.
Imagine your teams avoiding embarrassing phone calls (incorrect contacts).
Imagine if all this was possible with just a few clicks!!
You can stop imagining.
Yes, it’s here. It’s possible!!
Introducing SAP Data Enrichment
SAP Data Enrichment (alias ‘SAP S4HANA Cloud for Data Enrichment’), is a new platform that can help you improve the quality of Master Data in your organization.
There are a few Data Providers who collect, organize and offer high-quality Master Data (Customer, Vendor, Product info, etc.) via APIs.
Enterprises can leverage these APIs to integrate into their business processes to improve the quality of the Master Data, but there are a few challenges:
- Discoverability — Many don’t even know such a thing exists!
- Diversity — Data Providers might offer in diverse data formats, diverse auth mechanisms, and protocols.
- Time and Efforts— Understanding and Implementation will take quite a bit of time and effort.
- Maintenance Efforts — You have to keep up to date with the API changes by the Data Provider, which can take quite a bit of time and effort.
- Data Provider Lock-in — This is perhaps the biggest disadvantage; Once you are done integrating with one Data Provider you are locked-in!! If you are not happy with the quality of the Master Data, then it is a nightmare to switch to another Data Provider!
Benefits of SAP Data Enrichment
- Out-of-the-box Integration — SAP S4HANA and SAP MDG have built-in integrations, so you don’t have to do any additional coding!
- No Data Provider Lock-in — You can easily switch between different vendors without any hassle.
- No worries of Data Formats, Auth Mechanisms, and Protocols— Data Enrichment takes on the burden of dealing with different data formats, auth mechanisms, protocols, and ever-changing vendor APIs.
- Get Started in just a couple of hours!!!
Let’s explore TWO ways how this is possible using SAP Data Enrichment:
1. Single Enrichment
Let’s say you wanna create a new customer called Microsoft located in Bangalore, India. You can simply search in the Manage Customer App (Fiori), type “Microsoft” and choose the country as “India” and click “Search”.
Voila!!!
You get search results both from your S4HANA system as well as from the Data Providers (i.e., D&B or CDQ).
You can either choose to import the external record into your S4HANA system or you can even merge the data from the external record into one of your existing Customer Records.
Yes, it is that simple!
2. Mass Enrichment
When you are a big corporate you most probably already have millions of master data records of customers, vendors, etc.
For big corporates, enriching the existing data set is more important than new records. Hence, SAP has built a dedicated suite of apps just for this!
You can use “Start Mass Enrichment” and “Manage Mass Enrichment” apps to do just this.
These apps allow you to do the following:
- Selection — Choose the dataset you want to enrich
- Search — Match the dataset from your S4HANA system with Data Provider’s repository and fetch the results back. Users can even set the threshold, review the resulting matches, etc.
- Enrich — Users can select the entities/data-points to be taken over for enrichment and perform the actual enrichment in the staging area.
- Validation — There is a suite of validation which happens behind the scene to make sure data is right.
- Activation — This is the final step where the records are finally taken over and activated.
To summarize these apps offer users a very comprehensive, yet simple and well-organized way of dealing with huge datasets and enrich them seamlessly.
Summary
It is truly a magical moment when you realize the potential of system auto-filling & auto-correcting using seamless access to hundreds of millions of high-quality master data records from world’s best & most trusted Data Providers!!
All this magic in just a few clicks!!
That’s SAP Data Enrichment!!
#TheBestRunSAP
#SAPCloudDataManagement
#TrustedData
Disclaimer: I am part of the incredible team behind SAP Data Enrichment 😊
