Quality of Material Master Data and Its Effect on the Usefulness of Distributed ERP Systems

摘要

Master data is a main component of most information systems. In distributed and heterogeneous organizations, problems of data quality may arise if several Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, customized with respect to local business needs and objectives, use subsets of common master data. In this paper we describe data management issues in a large organization, running 10 instances of the SAP R/3 system. For coordinating purposes, common elements of materials master data are entered via a centralized application and subsequently distributed to the affected instances. However, this master data management approach did not avoid massive data quality problems, which are, for instance, hampering the computation of informative key performance values and the effective realization of inventory reduction programs. The paper discusses possible approaches for improving data quality in this situation and in other cases of distributed ERP systems.