DAMA - SAP MDG: Concept #10

❗️The Problem

Everyone wants dashboards.
Everyone wants KPIs.
Everyone wants insights.

But no one checks:

• Are the customer IDs consistent?

• Do product hierarchies match across systems?

• Are transaction records linked to the right vendors?

So you build a perfect dashboard — that shows the wrong numbers.

Garbage in, visuals out.

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🧠 What DAMA Says About Data Warehousing & BI

This area is about turning data into decisions.
But DAMA is clear:
Warehousing and analytics don’t clean data — they rely on it being clean.

That means:

• Correctness — The data is what you think it is

• Consistency — Across time, systems, reports

• Structure — Hierarchies, keys, mappings make sense

• Context — Metadata explains what you’re looking at

Analytics doesn't fix bad inputs.
It amplifies them.

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DAMA Key Components

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🔧 SAP MDG & BI: The Connection

SAP MDG is upstream of BI.
It feeds master data into S/4HANA, BW, SAC, or other reporting systems.

If master data is broken:

• Product hierarchies don’t roll up

• Customer segments collapse

• Vendor reports double-count

• Time series are misaligned

• Data scientists “fix” things manually — and introduce new errors

BI doesn’t know what’s wrong — it just visualizes it beautifully.

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⚠️ Real Symptoms

• Multiple dashboards show different totals for the same KPI

• No one agrees on what “Region North” includes

• The same vendor appears in different cost center reports

• Executives stop trusting the numbers — and revert to Excel

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🧠 What You Need to Control

• Are your BI systems getting data from the golden record?

• Are master data updates synchronized with reporting loads?

• Are key mappings consistent between source and warehouse?

• Do analytics teams know how master data is structured?

If not, you’re building strategy on sand.

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💬 Bottom Line

Business Intelligence is not about technology.
It’s about trusting what you see.

And trust starts with clean, governed master data.

If MDG fails, BI becomes decoration.