How Bekaert streamlined SAP MDG with 2,000+ business rules and smarter workflows
More control, automation and transparency across a global master data landscape
Accelerating Bekaert’s MDG landscape with Alluvion’s MPP
Founded in 1880 in Zwevegem (Belgium), Bekaert is a global market and technology leader in steel wire manufacturing, transformation and coating technologies. Listed on Euronext Brussels (BEKB), the company brings together a bit less than 25000 people worldwide.
Bekaert products show up almost everywhere, in cars, trains, tracks, trucks, elevators, mines, bridges, tunnels, agriculture, construction, and increasingly in new mobility, low-carbon construction and green energy.
About the project
Running master data at that scale is a serious undertaking. With operations spread across dozens of countries and a steady flow of new customers, suppliers and materials, Bekaert needed a robust and well-defined Master Data infrastructure that could properly translate the company’s needs in terms of data governance.
Like many large, international organizations, Bekaert had already invested in SAP MDG, but the current governance process carried a familiar set of frictions:
- Limited user knowledge of SAP MDG
- High volume of business rules and functional requirements
- Unclear approval chains
- Low transparency and ownership
Since Bekaert was preparing their brownfield conversion from ECC to S/4HANA, this was the opportunity to overcome these obstacles once and for all.
During some initial discussions, the Alluvion team demonstrated how these challenges could be tackled with multiple functionalities implemented in our Alluvion SAP MDG Productivity Pack (MPP).
The MPP adds value to SAP MDG in two ways. The first one is by moving the governance logic, such as validation and derivation logic, and similar business rules, towards SAP’s BRF+ framework. Doing so, hundreds of rules were implemented to handle Bekaert’s big set of functional requirements, while keeping it all easy to maintain for trained data stewards.
The second element where the MPP boosts the MDG landscape is by providing a set of new quality of life (QoL) features.
How we implemented the solution
The first goal at Bekaert was to ensure the master data team could configure and maintain the MPP features using the BRF+ framework. Through a combination of hands-on training sessions and comprehensive documentation, the team gained the knowledge and confidence to manage the solution independently.
During the implementation, this knowledge enabled us to define more than 2000 business rules, including derivations, field properties, and F4 value help filters. Because the team understood the Alluvion MPP framework, maintaining and extending these rules became much easier after go-live.
With the governance logic firmly in place, more advanced MPP capabilities could be leveraged to further streamline and automate key business processes. The result was a significantly improved user experience and more efficient governance through:
✔️ Clear ownership of tasks through checklist items and automated email notifications.
✔️Flexible workflows that route work items to the right teams and automatically approve requests when predefined conditions are met.
✔️Automatic creation of follow-up Change Requests where needed, reducing manual effort and improving process consistency.
Conclusion
Bekaert successfully went live with the Alluvion MPP at the end of May 2026, and the solution is now up and running in production with all the implemented enhancements. As with any successful implementation, the work does not stop at go-live. Together, opportunities to further optimize the solution will be identified to support Bekaert’s evolving business processes.
This project shows how the MPP can build on an existing SAP MDG environment to simplify governance, improve data quality, and give business users greater control over their master data.