What is enterprise content management?

Enterprise content management (ECM) is a software application that helps organizations create, organize, manage, integrate, secure, preserve, distribute, and publish unstructured content, such as Word, PDF, PPT, XLS, images, videos, and audio files. An important element of an effective ECM system is its integration with business applications, allowing users to work collaboratively within the context of the business process across the enterprise. ECM allows organizations to categorize and structure content in a meaningful, searchable way, improving the user experience and providing important analytical capabilities to drive better decision-making. Robust ECM solutions also provide strong records management capabilities to help lower costs and reduce compliance risks. Software-as-a-service–based ECM applications are commonly referred to as content services.

What is master data management?

Master data management (MDM) is the discipline of creating one trusted master reference (a single version of the truth) for all important business data, such as product data, customer data, asset data, finance data, and more. MDM helps ensure you don’t use multiple, potentially inconsistent versions of data in different parts of the business, including processes, operations, analytics, and reporting. The three key pillars to effective MDM include data consolidation, data governance, and data quality management. Consistent master data fuels operational excellence.

A data fabric automates the processing, integration, transformation, preparation, curation, governance, and orchestration of all data assets to enable real-time analytics and insights for successful business outcomes. It minimizes complexity by automating processes, workflows, and pipelines. It also streamlines data access to accelerate various use cases, such as providing a 360-degree view of customers, data science, fraud detection, internet-of-things (IoT) analytics, risk analytics, and healthcare insights. Our enterprise data fabric solution consists of capabilities from SAP Business Technology Platform, anchored by SAP Data Intelligence and SAP HANA (including SAP HANA Cloud).

How is business data fabric new and different?

The business data fabric builds on the data fabric approach to further simplify how organizations can deliver data to every consumer – with business context and application logic intact. While previous data fabric architectures successfully minimized data management complexity, most failed to keep the semantic context and application logic from the data sources. The full business perspective of data had to be manually rebuilt in parallel to deliver data in business terms. The business data fabric augments previous data fabric capabilities to retain and deliver the preestablished semantic context and application logic that come from the business data by default.

Data Management

With controlled access to a unified version of the truth, you can empower users to analyze and act on business-critical information.

Maximize the value of all your data with SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud.

Watch the event replays

Manage your data to maximize business impact

Leverage data as a catalyst to accelerate your business transformation, deliver more efficient and innovative business processes, and establish a solid foundation for analytics.

Data management framework

Accelerate transformation

Reduce costs, accelerate time to value, and minimize risk while creating a data foundation to keep you running at your best.

Fuel the business

Gain a unified, trusted view across domains, automate and improve business processes, and smoothly exchange master data across the entire business network value chain.

Strengthen your mission-critical data

Strengthen your enterprise data assets to propel the business forward with trusted data-driven processes, insights, and innovation.

Read the solution brochure

See how customers are succeeding with SAP

15%–20% productivity improvement

Explore how Adani Group improves productivity and increases visibility to grow the business with centralized master data management.

Read the customer story

100% visibility across the data lifecycle

Employees are gaining a greater understanding of the importance and impact of master data management and control

Read the customer story

IBM consulting an SAP BTP story

IBM consulting delivers data management, data integration, and custom development with SAP BTP.

Watch the video

What are analysts saying about data management solutions from SAP?

SAP ECM solutions by OpenText is helping organizations digitize their operations

Learn from IDC's business value study snapshot on SAP Enterprise Content Management Solutions. See the facts and view how customers optimized their document and vendor invoice management-related operations and what the benefits were worth.

IDC Business Value Study Snapshot

IDC Business Value Study

The Let’s Talk Data podcast series

Stay tuned for new podcasts and catch up on topics you might have missed.

Listen to this podcast series on all things data!

This season, we're diving deep into the real challenges of data today and how building trust in data can transform your business.

Listen to the latest podcast

Learn more about this data podcast series

Frequently asked questions

: Enterprise content management (ECM) is a software application that helps organizations create, organize, manage, integrate, secure, preserve, distribute, and publish unstructured content, such as Word, PDF, PPT, XLS, images, videos, and audio files. An important element of an effective ECM system is its integration with business applications, allowing users to work collaboratively within the context of the business process across the enterprise. ECM allows organizations to categorize and structure content in a meaningful, searchable way, improving the user experience and providing important analytical capabilities to drive better decision-making. Robust ECM solutions also provide strong records management capabilities to help lower costs and reduce compliance risks. Software-as-a-service–based ECM applications are commonly referred to as content services.
: Master data management (MDM) is the discipline of creating one trusted master reference (a single version of the truth) for all important business data, such as product data, customer data, asset data, finance data, and more. MDM helps ensure you don’t use multiple, potentially inconsistent versions of data in different parts of the business, including processes, operations, analytics, and reporting. The three key pillars to effective MDM include data consolidation, data governance, and data quality management. Consistent master data fuels operational excellence.
: A data fabric automates the processing, integration, transformation, preparation, curation, governance, and orchestration of all data assets to enable real-time analytics and insights for successful business outcomes. It minimizes complexity by automating processes, workflows, and pipelines. It also streamlines data access to accelerate various use cases, such as providing a 360-degree view of customers, data science, fraud detection, internet-of-things (IoT) analytics, risk analytics, and healthcare insights. Our enterprise data fabric solution consists of capabilities from SAP Business Technology Platform, anchored by SAP Data Intelligence and SAP HANA (including SAP HANA Cloud).
: The business data fabric builds on the data fabric approach to further simplify how organizations can deliver data to every consumer – with business context and application logic intact. While previous data fabric architectures successfully minimized data management complexity, most failed to keep the semantic context and application logic from the data sources. The full business perspective of data had to be manually rebuilt in parallel to deliver data in business terms. The business data fabric augments previous data fabric capabilities to retain and deliver the preestablished semantic context and application logic that come from the business data by default.

+1-800-872-1727