From Manual Entry to Fully Automated SAP Processes

Efficient management and automation of master data is crucial for modern companies. In particular, material master data — as a central element of logistics and production processes — is key to value creation. Its correct and consistent maintenance directly influences productivity and cost efficiency.

Together with our customer, we successfully automated the entire material master landscape. With the services provided, we ensured the simple and seamless creation, modification, and viewing of a wide variety of material types for the customer.

This initiative resulted in demonstrably higher data quality and reliability. As a result, the well-known negative effects of faulty or incomplete material master data — from incorrect orders to costly delivery issues and planning errors — could be proactively avoided.

The customer approached us with the challenge of simplifying and automating the entire process from product design to production planning. One of the biggest hurdles was the as-is process for finished goods, which proved cumbersome and error-prone. The process was as follows:

• The designer creates and documents the design in Word, including a textual description of the design bill of materials (BOM).
• A colleague in production planning transfers the information from the Word document into SAP data. This requires verifying feasibility and implementing the contents from the Word file.
• The colleague creates all required production components in SAP, coordinating with additional colleagues for the creation of specific SAP master data, particularly material master data.
• The textual design BOM must be manually transferred into a production order.

A particular challenge in this process was the absence of a regular routing and production BOM. This meant that similar finished goods repeatedly required the same manual work — not only inefficient, but also prone to errors and difficult to track.

With our expertise and in close cooperation with the customer, we developed tailored processes for each material type that simplify SAP data entry to the extent that using Word is no longer necessary. The new optimized as-is process for finished goods is now as follows:

• The designer creates the design directly in a bRobots® request, ensuring all necessary information is available from the start in a structured and system-relevant format.
• Responsible colleagues automatically receive the bRobots® request and, with further bRobots® processes, the material master data and any required components are created automatically.
• A colleague in production planning receives the bRobots® request with all material master data already created automatically and the original design. They can perform a final check and correct any inconsistencies directly in the request. Direct communication with previous participants in the bRobots® request is possible at any time, significantly improving information exchange. Upon approval of the bRobots® request, a comprehensive automation process is triggered:
  • the material master for the finished product
  • the design BOM
  • the production BOM
  • the routing
  • and the production version in the material master of the finished product

are created automatically.

As a result of this request process, reusable, high-quality master data is now available in the system. This data can be immediately used for a production order or reused in the future for similar or identical finished goods.

By closely integrating the designer with production planning, important information is no longer lost. Automated creation eliminates the error risk of manual data transfer into SAP master data by production planners. This leads to increased transparency and accuracy across all business areas, improving audit performance through easier traceability and documentation.

MDG is more than just an IT project — it is a strategic investment in a company’s future. It not only enables process optimization and risk reduction but also turns data into a valuable asset that secures a long-term competitive advantage. Through centralized master data maintenance, automated duplicate checks, defined validation rules, and approval workflows, data quality is continuously improved.

So, if you too are tired of manual transfer errors and “Chinese whispers” between your departments, contact us now to optimize your material master data governance and maximize your value chain.