What Is Unicode Exactly?

In one sentence....

Unicode provides a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.

Click the link to understand why having all your system's data represented in Unicode is becoming critically important at the Unicode Consortium's website.

Let's look at Unicode from an SAP perspective first prior to discussing what it is.

The Enterprise Data Problem

An enterprise sometimes have many instances of the same data distributed over multiple applications eg. Vendor master, Material Master, purchasing info in their plant maintenance systems, ordering systems, logistics systems etc...

This happens over time as different applications have need for this data, and the data gets replicated to it. Many of these systems are legacy applications more than ten years old. The problem with distributed data rears it's ugly head when enterprise reporting is necessary.

Because of the same data being represented in different formats in different systems, many companies still use spreadsheets with inputs from reports from these different systems because of the difficulty of harmonizing the data across systems.

There is no single source of truth for the data. The net result is that month end, quarterly and year end reporting can be complex, painful, manual, fraught with inaccuracies and prone to error.

SAP's answer to this problem is MDM (Master Data Management). The intent being that one system will be the source of truth for all data in the enterprise, and feeds going from it to the satellite systems that need it. When an update to the data definition gets made, the change ripples through all the system that subscribe to this data definition. When you have a common definition of data across the enterprise you can perform analysis, reporting and data mining because you can be more confident of common meaning of the data being mined.

In order to accomplish harmonizing of data, your data representation needs to be consistent. If system A stores it's data in non-Unicode format, and system B stores it in Unicode format, you have to translate these character sets in addition to data translation. This can result in "silent data loss" because of mismatching in the conversion process. It happens because different platforms can use DIFFERENT CODES to represent the same character!

The Building Blocks Of Harmonized Data

For the enterprise to achieve the goal of faster period closings, accurate interfaces and accurate reporting, they have to perform the following steps:

1. Convert all systems to the same data representation format. Unicode.
2. Have a common definition of data so that it is understood and interpreted the same in all computer systems of the enterprise
3. Have a mechanism for establishing data governance to ensure data standards compliance in order to maintain the goal of step #2
4. The next logical step is to build in re-usability of business code in interfaces and reporting so that code to interpret a business object is not recoded over and over again. This re-usability of business code is enabled with SAP's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and any middleware tool. Therefore if the code for a business object needs to change it is made in one place and all systems that use that object will automatically and immediately have it available to them

In the meantime, if you have questions or thoughts to share, post a message in our Unicode forum