ERP Master Data Management for Data Stewards Training Course

Course overview

ERP master data errors create operational problems that are expensive to trace: duplicate suppliers delay payments, inconsistent material attributes disrupt planning, incorrect customer hierarchies distort sales reporting, and uncontrolled changes undermine audit trails. Data stewards sit at the point where business definitions, ERP processes and data quality controls meet. This course prepares them to govern the master records that purchasing, finance, manufacturing, sales and logistics depend on, rather than treating data correction as a series of isolated clean-up tasks.

Participants learn to define data ownership, build practical data standards, assess data quality, manage the create-change-retire lifecycle, and control master-data requests through approval workflows. The course covers customer, supplier, material or product, financial and organisational master data; business rules; reference data; duplicate prevention; validation; enrichment; and stewardship metrics. Participants practise profiling data, documenting critical data elements, writing validation rules, resolving exceptions, and designing controls that work across ERP teams.

Instructor-led demonstrations and realistic ERP data cases are combined with workshops using SAP S/4HANA and SAP Master Data Governance concepts, Excel Power Query analysis, and ISO 8000 data-quality principles. Participants work from a flawed master-data scenario through to a controlled operating model. They leave with a completed Master Data Stewardship Pack containing a data-domain ownership matrix, business glossary entries, data-quality rules, issue log, workflow design and 90-day improvement plan.

The programme suits business-facing and technical professionals who have responsibility for the accuracy, consistency or governance of ERP master data. It is particularly valuable where organisations are standardising data, implementing or upgrading ERP platforms, integrating acquired businesses, or preparing for data migration.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Map customer, supplier, material and finance master-data domains to ERP business processes and accountable owners
• Define critical data elements, approved values and business glossary entries for an ERP data domain
• Profile ERP master-data extracts to identify completeness, validity, conformity, uniqueness and timeliness defects
• Write executable-style data-quality rules, thresholds and exception-handling procedures for master records
• Design a create-change-block-retire workflow with request forms, approvals, segregation of duties and audit evidence
• Apply duplicate-detection and survivorship criteria to supplier, customer and material record remediation cases
• Build a steward scorecard using data-quality KPIs, issue ageing, root-cause categories and trend reporting
• Produce a 90-day master-data improvement plan with prioritised controls, owners, milestones and measures

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• ERP Data Stewards — who approve, maintain or monitor business master records across one or more data domains
• Master Data Management Analysts — who need repeatable rules, profiling methods and remediation workflows
• Business Data Owners — who must set definitions, quality expectations and accountability for critical ERP data
• ERP Functional Analysts — who configure or support master-data processes in procurement, finance, sales, manufacturing or logistics
• Data Governance Managers — who need to establish stewardship controls and evidence their effectiveness
• ERP Migration and Integration Specialists — who must prepare, cleanse and govern records moving between systems

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should understand the basic purpose of an ERP system and be familiar with at least one business process such as procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report or plan-to-produce. Experience viewing or maintaining customer, supplier, product, material or general-ledger records is useful, but not essential. Participants should be comfortable working with spreadsheet tables, filters and simple formulas; Excel Power Query is introduced during the course. No SAP configuration experience, coding ability, database administration background or prior formal data-governance qualification is required. Complete beginners should expect to spend time learning ERP master-data terminology before progressing to quality controls and stewardship design.

Training methodology

The five days combine focused instructor-led teaching with guided analysis of realistic customer, supplier, material and finance master-data extracts. Participants use data dictionaries, profiling worksheets, Excel Power Query, workflow maps and issue logs to practise the work of a data steward. Short SAP S/4HANA and SAP Master Data Governance demonstrations show where governance concepts appear in an ERP environment. Group case work requires participants to negotiate ownership, approval rules and remediation priorities. Each day adds an artefact to a final Master Data Stewardship Pack and concludes with application planning for the participant’s own data domain.

Course outline

Day 1: ERP master-data foundations and stewardship accountabilities

• ERP transactional data, master data and reference data distinctions
• Customer, supplier, material, product, finance and organisational data domains
• Critical data elements and their downstream process dependencies
• Data owner, data steward, custodian and process owner responsibilities
• RACI matrices for master-data decisions and escalation
• Master-data lifecycle stages from creation to retirement
• Business glossary structure and definition approval principles

Workshop: Participants map a selected ERP data domain to business processes and produce a RACI matrix with critical data elements and accountable roles.

Day 2: Data standards, profiling and quality-rule design

• ISO 8000 data-quality concepts and fit-for-purpose criteria
• Completeness, validity, conformity, uniqueness, consistency and timeliness measures
• Data profiling techniques for nulls, patterns, outliers and invalid codes
• Excel Power Query cleansing and profiling steps
• Controlled vocabularies, code lists and reference-data management
• Business-rule specification using condition, threshold, owner and action
• Data-quality scorecards and acceptance thresholds

Workshop: Participants profile a supplier and material extract in Excel Power Query and produce a data-quality assessment with five prioritised rules.

Day 3: Master-data lifecycle controls and ERP workflows

• Create, change, extend, block and retire process controls
• Master-data request forms and mandatory field design
• Approval routing, delegation and escalation rules
• Segregation of duties for master-data maintenance
• SAP S/4HANA master-data record concepts and change documents
• SAP Master Data Governance change-request workflow concepts
• Audit trails, evidence retention and control testing

Workshop: Participants design a controlled supplier-change workflow, including required fields, approval gates, segregation-of-duties checks and audit evidence.

Day 4: Remediation, duplicate prevention and issue management

• Duplicate matching criteria for customer, supplier and material records
• Standardisation of names, addresses, units of measure and identifiers
• Survivorship rules and golden-record selection decisions
• Root-cause analysis using five whys and process mapping
• Data issue logging, triage, assignment and service-level targets
• Bulk remediation risk controls and reconciliation checks
• Migration readiness assessment and data-cleansing waves

Workshop: Participants resolve a duplicate supplier case, document survivorship decisions, and create an issue log with root causes and preventive controls.

Day 5: Stewardship operating model and improvement planning

• Stewardship operating-model components and governance forums
• KPI selection for defect rates, approval cycle time and issue ageing
• Dashboard design for data owners and operational managers
• Prioritisation using business impact, risk, effort and data-volume criteria
• Stakeholder communication for quality-rule adoption
• Control monitoring, exception reporting and continuous improvement cycles
• Ninety-day roadmap development and benefit tracking

Workshop: Participants assemble and present a Master Data Stewardship Pack containing ownership, rules, workflow, KPI scorecard, issue controls and a 90-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

SAP S/4HANA, SAP Master Data Governance, Microsoft Excel Power Query, ISO 8000

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions