I'm an SAP MDG consultant. Not a data migration consultant.
They sound similar, but they solve different problems:
- Data migration moves data once, at go-live, from the old system to the new one.
- MDG governs master data for as long as the system lives: who can create or change it, who approves it, how it's validated, and how it's replicated to every system that depends on it.
Treat MDG like a migration project and you end up with a one-time cleanup that decays within months, with no owners, no rules and no approval flow.
The same confusion shows up in tool choice. Platforms like Reltio are built to manage and govern master data continuously too, and they are a real alternative to MDG in many landscapes. But teams that think only in terms of moving data often never put them on the comparison list, because they're asking "how do we load the data?" and not "who owns it after go-live?"
If your plan says "MDG is just migration with a UI", pause and ask who will own the data a year after go-live.
Migration gets your data in. Governance keeps it right.
#SAPMDG #MasterDataGovernance #Reltio #SAP
