Product
How Bluebird gets your master data ready for S/4HANA.
One flow for seven master data objects: extract, cleanse, classify, review, load and verify. Here is what each step does, and what your team sees.
The flow
Seven steps, the same for every object.
| Step | What Bluebird does | What your team does |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Extract | Reads exports from SAP ECC, Maximo, JDE and spreadsheets (CSV or Excel), recognizes the columns, and keeps where every value came from. | Provide the extracts. |
| 2. Cleanse | Normalizes units and abbreviations, finds duplicates across systems, and flags obsolete records from usage data. | Confirm merges and retirements. |
| 3. Classify and map | Fills golden templates, codes UNSPSC or your taxonomy, and maps finance objects to the target design. | Check low-confidence records. |
| 4. Review | Routes each record by confidence: auto-accept with a QA sample, a steward, or an expert. | Approve, edit or reject. |
| 5. Golden records | One record per real part, partner, account or cost object, with full lineage. | |
| 6. Load and verify | Validates against your target configuration, dry-runs, loads into SAP, reads back. | Approve the load. |
| 7. Govern | Keeps the same rules for new requests after go-live (on our roadmap). |
What it covers
Seven master data objects.
Materials
The hardest domain: free-text descriptions, duplicates across plants, little consistent classification.
- Duplicate matching across systems, precision first; never merges across manufacturers
- Classification into 50+ golden templates, or your own SAP classes and characteristics
- Standard short and long texts within SAP's 40-character limit
- UNSPSC and bespoke taxonomy codes
- Obsolescence from a usage report; consolidation across business units
- AI agents that fill missing attributes from the record and its sources, as proposals
Customers and vendors
ECC keeps them apart; S/4HANA wants one business partner per company.
- Matching on tax ID, bank account, and name with address; never across countries or different tax IDs
- A company that's both a customer and a vendor becomes one partner with both roles
- Flags shared bank accounts, shared tax IDs and conflicting bank details for a person
- Checks postal codes, tax numbers and IBANs by country, roles, reconciliation accounts and organizations
- Blocked, deleted or inactive partners proposed as obsolete; open items always keep a partner
Services and BOMs
Services classify like materials. BOMs follow the materials they're built from.
- Service templates for labor, inspection, calibration and repair
- BOM parents and components rewritten to golden materials
- Duplicate lines combined; identical BOMs of merged parents merged, differing ones flagged
- Missing, obsolete and ambiguous components, and cycles, caught before the load
G/L accounts, cost centers, WBS
A mapping workbench: legacy data in, target design in, every record mapped.
- Mapping from a mapping file, the same number, a name match in the same group, or by hand
- S/4HANA checks: account groups and number ranges, cost element categories, controlling areas, hierarchy
- WBS hierarchy, closed projects, and settlement to the new cost centers
- A legacy-to-new crosswalk for converting balances and open items
Rationalization
Most of the reduction isn't duplicates.
On a 360,000-record program our founder led, about a third were duplicates. The rest of the reduction to 90,000 came from obsolete records and consolidation across business units. Bluebird treats both as first-class work.
- Rules you can readNo movement for three years, no stock, nothing on order. Change the rules per project.
- Reasons on every record"No movement since 2016" or "kept: used in a BOM", so audit can see why something wasn't migrated.
- Nothing undecided is loadedCandidates wait for a person, and decisions survive every re-run.
Templates and taxonomies
Your categories, or ours.
MRO library
50+ templates for common maintenance parts: bearings, seals, fasteners, pipe and fittings, valves, electrical, instruments, power transmission, filters, lubricants, safety.
Your SAP classes
Import your existing classes and characteristics. Bluebird classifies into them and exports with your characteristic names.
UNSPSC and bespoke
Code every record in UNSPSC (from your licensed codeset), your own taxonomy, or both, with crosswalks between them.
| Legacy description | Golden record |
|---|---|
| GATE VALVE 2" CLASS 150 WCB RF FLANGED | VALVE,GATE: 2IN, 150#, CARBON STEEL, FLANGED |
| O-RING VITON AS568-214 | O-RING: 214, FKM |
| FUSE 30A 600V CLASS J TIME DELAY | FUSE: 30A, 600V, CLASS J, TIME DELAY |
| BRG TAPERED ROLLER CONE LM11949 | BEARING,ROLLER,TAPERED: LM11949, CONE |
Review
The business decides. Bluebird does the legwork.
Routed by confidence
High-confidence records are auto-accepted with a QA sample. The rest go to the steward who owns the category, or to an expert.
Work queues that move
My queue, unassigned, in review, reviewed. Claim, approve, edit, reject, reassign, comment. Bulk actions where they're safe.
Re-runs keep decisions
Load a new extract and run again. Everything a person reviewed, edited or commented on stays exactly as it was.
Loading into SAP
Two routes into S/4HANA, both with a dry run.
Only approved records that pass every check are loaded. Each dry run allows one load of exactly what it checked.
SAP's released APIs
Materials, services, business partners and BOMs, created through SAP's standard OData services. Each record is read back and compared, and the numbers SAP assigns flow back into Bluebird.
Migration Cockpit staging tables
Every object, finance included, written into the staging tables of your Migration Cockpit project. SAP then runs its own checks and load.
- Never overwritesRecords already in SAP are skipped.
- Never sends twiceA create SAP doesn't clearly confirm stops the load for a person to check.
- Results per recordCreated, already there, different, blocked or failed, with SAP's own message, downloadable for the cutover log.
Security
What your security team will ask.
Deployment and access
- Hosting
- One deployment per client, in your cloud account or a dedicated environment
- Sign-in
- Single sign-on (OIDC: Entra ID, Okta and others); roles from your identity provider
- Roles
- Admin, expert, steward, viewer; projects limited to named members
- Audit
- Every change, sign-in, export, load and purge
Data
- AI
- Optional. Without it, nothing leaves the deployment. With it, data goes to the AI provider under API terms that exclude training
- SAP credentials
- Stored encrypted; never shown again; cleared if the connection's address changes
- Pilots
- Anonymize exports on your side before sharing
- Retention
- Purge on request or after a set idle period
- Not yet
- SOC 2 and a third-party penetration test are on our roadmap
Questions
Straight answers.
Is Bluebird a replacement for SAP MDG or the Migration Cockpit?
No. Bluebird prepares the data and loads it, through SAP's APIs or into the Migration Cockpit's staging tables. MDG governs data after go-live; Bluebird can hand over clean data and the same rules.
Which systems can it read from?
Anything that exports to CSV or Excel: SAP ECC, Maximo, JDE and spreadsheets are the common ones. Column names are recognized automatically, and every value keeps a record of where it came from.
Does it need AI?
No. The matching, validation and loading are deterministic rules. AI helps classify hard records and fill missing attributes, always as proposals a person accepts. You can switch it off.
How do we try it without sharing confidential data?
Run our anonymizer on your export before sending it. It replaces names, numbers, tax IDs and bank details on your machine, keeps the duplicates and spelling variants that make the data hard, and gives the same results as the original.
Where does it run?
In your cloud account or a dedicated environment, one deployment per client, with single sign-on through your identity provider.
Is it ready for production?
The software runs end to end today. We're working with design partners to prove it on live S/4HANA migrations, and we're open about what's been tested and what hasn't.
How is it priced?
A per-engagement fee based on the objects and record volumes in scope, plus delivery services alongside your SI partner. Talk to us for a quote.
See it on your own data.
Send a sample export, anonymized on your side, and we'll walk you through the results.