This is an excellent Article highlighting the use of ALE for Business Warehousing and CRM perspective. Front end ( or seed Master data) changes can be effectively handled through these Change pointers as detailed in this article.

Also in currentscenario of Business Warehousing (BW) and SEM capturing Master Data changes for Infocubes will be highly useful if activated correctly through ALE methods descrbed here.

SAP also allows changes to Master Data (from 4.6 C Version) through controlled Web Templates. These can be configured through respective IMG settings.