Infoverity, LLC has successfully completed the newest phase of MDM design for a client in the healthcare products and pharmaceutical distribution industry. Prior SAP/MDM deployments highlighted many design gaps related to master data creation/editing during the testing phase, where limited time and budget were available to refine the design.
The project goal was to identify design risks and gaps across MDM processes and diverse technologies supporting an SAP deployment, and mitigate the risks with a higher-context, prototype-based redesign and testing approach.
Approach
Leveraging its FlexFrame methodology, Infoverity performed a design review of the Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) processes and analyzed in-depth the business and system interactions through the MDM design. This approach addressed one of the root causes of risk in the program: the division of design and development tasks within functional and technical silos. Infoverity directed efforts across Customer, Product, and Supplier data domains, with an emphasis in three focus areas:
Focus Area 1: Eliminate current-state compartmentalized processes
Prior projects divided the processes associated with master data creation into functional and technical silos. Consequently, design decisions were made without context due to the lack of visibility to the lifecycle of data across systems, process steps and business functions. Infoverity’s goal was to design the CRUD process around a ‘day in the life’ of data using prototypes to confirm all processes were documented.
Focus Area 2: Challenge the Differentiation of Data Cleansing, Interface and Conversion Teams.
Three separate teams were responsible for data cleansing, interface, and conversion designs, which resulted in differences to documentation, stakeholder involvement, and the design itself. Infoverity’s goal was to embed design elements of each team into a process-driven design model that better reflected the CRUD lifecycle.
Focus Area 3: Design including exception scenarios
Prior client design efforts often were completed in small groups using generic, mainstream data to vet the design and authorize development. Smaller meetings were easier to schedule (often involving a ‘source’ and ‘target’ role), and scenarios focused on the most universally understood create or edit scenarios. Infoverity’s goal was to leverage real data in all design scenarios, including unique or exception scenarios that proved valuable ‘acid tests’ of the effort.
Results
The Infoverity CRUD process was successful in identifying and mitigating key design gaps and data issues through the CRUD approach. Several key wins were:
Design Gaps Closed
The gap analysis through prototypes and business/system interaction models identified and resolved forty key functional, technical and attribute-level gaps for all three master data domains; Customer, Supplier and Product.
Functional Requirements Revised and Approved
Using the process flows and prototypes, Infoverity was successful refining functional requirements, building consensus on the design, as well as understand future MDM requirements.
Test Scripts and Conditions Delivered
Test conditions and scripts were written which more fully described all success and exception scenarios. These scripts became an integral part of the successful testing, deployment and business acceptance of the SAP solution.
