Kraft skims single source of truth from SAP ERP with MDM rollout

The announcement came at SAP TechEd 2008 in Las Vegas, yesterday, with Mark Johnson, senior director, Operations and Business Services at Kraft, explaining that the system has integrated and consolidated data both from SAP and non-SAP legacy systems – also enabling more effective reporting while additionally streamlining compliance. He said that, in less than nine months, Kraft’s SAP NetWeaver MDM project rolled out data repositories covering customer, product, vendor and materials data, to provide a foundation of comprehensive, real-time data as the company embarked upon a North American rollout of SAP ERP. “Unified master data is a critical component in Kraft’s global business transformation effort,” he said. “Investing in technological innovations, such as SAP NetWeaver MDM, provides key decision-makers with reliable real-time access to master data from SAP and non-SAP solutions – transcending organisational, geographic and systems boundaries. “Our teams are now able to make more effective decisions, improve collaboration with suppliers and trading partners, and more easily comply with reporting requirements. By establishing an effective master data management process, we will gain a broader view of our company’s data, streamline our SAP ERP deployment and accelerate the time to value for the new system.” He also made the point that consumer products companies, particularly food companies like Kraft, are challenged to track, update and report on data covering thousands of finished goods, including sources of ingredients. That meant, that to comply with reporting regulations and increase efficiencies in business processes, Kraft needed to standardise data to arrive at a ‘single source of truth’ – eliminating redundancies and data discrepancies. As part of this process, Kraft established a global data governance model to help improve data integrity. Beyond that, however, he believes that Kraft will be able to develop more accurate insights into customer needs and help employees make better business decisions faster. Johnson explained that the company is utilising SAP NetWeaver Process Integration as the integration layer for moving foundation data into SAP ERP. He also said that Kraft is implementing universal data feeds out of MDM as part of its service-orientated architecture, which allows all systems to get the data they need without building multiple interfaces. This strategy allows Kraft to have a single source of master data, reducing the number of disparate data sources, creating consistent definitions and providing opportunities to harmonise wherever possible.