The monitor is an accelerator developed by Pearl Group for creating and maintaining material master data and material related master data objects based on file uploads. The files are received from suppliers through an integration and collected by the solution to be read. It is also possible to upload manually created excel files for material creation directly in SAP S/4HANA. This leads to the article monitor been the single solution for material creation.
Before a material is ready to be used by the processes within SAP S/4HANA the data must be enriched with SAP S/4HANA relevant information. Also, a purchase info record needs to be created and the material needs to be assigned to the correct assortments and article hierarchies. This will all be handled in total by the article monitor. This solution will lead to less maintenance, higher master data quality and an automation of the complete material creation process.
The solution supports different file formats, and it is highly flexible in such a way that fields in SAP S/4HANA are mapped against the information given in the file. Validation of the data provided in the file is a central part of the solution. Errors and warnings are highlighted so that, for instance, duplicates and wrong or missing data can be corrected before the data is created or changed in SAP S/4HANA. The article monitor can be run in an approval mode. This means that each of the line items representing a material must be approved before it can be created. The materials that are not approved will not be created in SAP S/4HANA and disappear from the working list.
The article monitor can also be used to automatically change material information based on received files. This is highly relevant for price changes and supplier stock information. An approval is then not necessary since the material is already created.
When the article monitor is implemented, adjustments are needed so that the solution can fully support the Customer’s complete material creation process. Each Customer does have Customer specific attributes that needs to be handled, and the enrichment process itself will also differ since Customers do have different logic for driving standard SAP S/4HANA fields. If it is not possible to enrich a material or a type of material automatically based on logic, the relevant fields can also be made editable in the article monitor directly. The search filter in the article monitor also needs to be enhanced so that the Customer can search for the relevant materials by the desired attributes.