Over the last decade, the number of companies that have invested in packaged applications to help run their business operations and to analyze business activity has climbed steadily. Many of those companies have selected SAP as a strategic provider for packaged applications. This selection may have been made for one specific SAP application (e.g. enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finance and/or human resources) or for the complete suite of SAP operational packaged applications, which includes ERP, customer relationship management, supply chain management, supplier relationship management and product lifecycle management. Packaged SAP solutions may also have been purchased for manufacturing, asset management, performance management, business intelligence and master data management.

Therefore, for many organizations the selection of SAP packaged applications has been a strategic investment that is driven by the need to improve and underpin core operational and analytical business processes. However, to maximize the benefits of an investment in SAP applications it is also necessary to integrate them with non-SAP applications to increase process integration — and to share core master and transaction data created in SAP with other systems in other parts of the enterprise.

Whatever the investment in SAP, one thing is clear — the benefit from process improvement expected from such a strategic investment is not going to be down to just the applications and processes themselves. It is also dependent on the quality of data within these applications and the ability to synchronize changes to this data across SAP and non-SAP applications. In addition, most companies need to integrate SAP and non- SAP data to create common shared master data and common shared business intelligence in an enterprise data warehouse. Therefore, a critical success factor when implementing SAP is to not just focus on the packaged applications, but to also make sure that data quality and data integration are managed in order to yield the maximum return on investment. Without data quality and data integration, business processes will still be plagued by defects caused by inability to eradicate data errors, and an inability to integrate, consolidate, share and synchronize core operational data, master data and historical analytical data across the enterprise.

This paper looks at the SAP applications and SAP infrastructure technologies and the impact of poor data quality in an SAP environment. It then defines the requirements needed to support data quality and data integration for SAP customers and the components needed for enterprise data management in an SAP environment. The paper concludes by looking at how one supplier – DataFlux – is bringing products to market to support these needs.