SAP has been making progress across the enterprise information management (EIM) solution portfolio over the past few months. We also acknowledge the importance of achieving information excellence at this time of unprecedented change.
Relying on trusted data to find the right path forward has never been more important. Companies across the globe are rethinking the way they do business — they must make decisions at a rapid pace and need access to timely and accurate information from inside and outside their organization to do so.
Data management solutions from SAP play a pivotal role in helping customers navigate change. They provide the foundation for data-driven intelligence with the ability to manage, govern, and integrate data across distributed landscapes with speed and simplicity. Armed with trust and understanding of their data assets, organizations can anticipate risk and drive better business outcomes.
Companies such as The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Kaiserwetter are already reaping the benefits of partnering with SAP for their enterprise data strategies. These 2020 SAP Innovation Award winners are using data management from SAP to transform business processes and services, influence business outcomes, and achieve information excellence.
New innovations and integrations across the portfolio help users derive even greater value from data and navigate change with confidence and agility.
New Innovations
SAP’s innovation focus has been centered around delivering value from distributed data assets, operationalizing machine learning, increasing data literacy across the organization, and helping customers rely on trusted data.
For example, we have unified data orchestration and machine learning services across hybrid environments — an industry first. To do so, we have combined the power of SAP Data Hub and SAP Data Intelligence into one solution that can deploy in the cloud and on premise, making it easier to operationalize machine learning models within data pipelines and applications. This means shorter time-to-insights and action.
Having access to a central repository for business terms and definitions is essential to overcome ambiguity and promote a shared understanding of key concepts across an organization. For this reason, SAP has introduced a new business glossary in SAP Data Intelligence that helps promote data literacy across an organization and improve collaboration. This new capability comes with templates to help create and define new terms as well as group them into categories. Users can also retrieve expert ratings, profile data, track data lineage, and perform impact analysis.
We all recognize that master data quality is essential for efficient operations and informed decision making. Yet defining quality rules is often a daunting task involving many meetings and exchanges between business units and data teams. With SAP Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA 1909, users can now leverage machine learning for mining quality rules in master data. This new capability can dramatically streamline the process of improving the quality of master data. Business users and data experts can then collaboratively review the new rules and decide which one to approve. The integration with the rule repository then allows for adding the new rules to a master data process without delay.
New Integrations
SAP’s integration efforts have focused around industrializing the use of third-party data and expanding data reach, allowing customers to extract value from their distributed data assets faster and with less effort.
For example, enriching application data with third-party data is now simpler. We have integrated SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Data with SAP Master Data Governance so users can find, procure, and consume relevant data sets promptly to enrich an application. This helps eliminate the manual work needed to keep data accurate and up to date. Data enrichment is currently available for operational data for business partner records. Available subscriptions include Duns & Bradstreet and the Corporate Data League. Subscribing to all data attributes or a just a subset with coverage across multiple industries and geographies is possible.
SAP has also broadened connectivity options with built-in integrations to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure data stores. Specifically, users can now browse fact sheets and data previews in AWS RedShift from SAP Data Intelligence metadata explorer. Extract metadata, profile data, and validate rules in Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage is also possible. Plus, Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage can be used in data preparation.
Looking at the compound value of the new capabilities, they increase the ability to establish information trust, expand data literacy across an organization, and turn distributed data assets into a competitive advantage. SAP’s continued focus on improving synergy across the portfolio and with third-party offerings allows users to simplify operations and derive more value from their SAP investments.
Learn more about the data management portfolio here, and find useful resources to help achieve tangible business outcomes from enterprise data strategy here. Listen to a recent session about next-generation data management solutions from SAP, watch a replay of the SAP Data Management Briefing: The Next Generation. And join the conversation on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Kristin McMahon is vice president of Global Solution Area Marketing for Platform & Technologies at SAP.