For the last 3 decades, companies have been relying on ERP and CRM packages to run their operations.
In response to the need to comply with regulations, reduce risk, improve profitability, competitiveness and customer engagement, they have to become Data Driven.
In addition to the need of leveraging a wide variety of new data assets produced heavily by new means, strategic data from those historical systems have to be involved in any Data Initiative.
Challenges faced by companies trying to leverage data from ERP/CRM to feed their digital initiatives
In the gold rush that companies are pursuing with Artificial Intelligence, Advance Analytics and in any Digital Transformation program, understanding and leveraging Data from ERP/CRM packages is in the critical path in any Data Governance journey.
First, they have large, complex, hard to understand and customized database models. Understanding the descriptions, the relationship definitions and more means to serve Data Citizens is almost impossible without an appropriate Data Catalog like Zeenea with ad hoc ERP/CRM connectors.
As an example, SAP has more than 90.000 table sets. As a consequence, a Data Scientist will hardly understand the so called TF120 table in SAP or the F060116 in JD Edwards.
Secondly, identifying a comprehensive subset of accurate datasets to serve a specific Data initiative is an obstacle course.
Indeed, a big percentage of the tables in those systems are empty, may appear redundant or have complex links for those who are not experts of the ERP/CRM domain.
Thirdly, the demand for fast, agile and ROI focused Data Driven initiatives put the ERP/CRM knowledgeable personnel in the middle of the game.
ERP/CRM experts are rare, busy and expensive workers and companies cannot afford increasing those team or having them losing their focus.
And finally, if a Data Catalog is not able to properly store Metadata information for those systems, in a smooth, comprehensive and effective way, any data initiative will be deprived of a large part of its capabilities.
The need for financial data, manufacturing data and customer data to take a few examples is obvious and therefore put ERP/CRM systems as mandatory data sources of any Meta Data Management program.
Zeenea value proposition
An agile and easy way
At Zeenea, we believe in a Data Democracy world, where, any employee of a company can discover, understand and trust any dataset that is useful.
This is only possible with a reality proof data catalog easily and straightforwardly connecting to any data source, including the ones from ERP/CRMP packages.
But mostly, a Data Catalog has to be smart, easy to use, easy to implement and easy to scale in a complex IT Landscape.
A wide connectivity
Zeenea provides Premium ERP/CRM connectors for the following packages:
- SAP and SAP/4HANA
- SAP BW
- Salesforce
- Oracle E Business Suite
- JD Edwards
- Siebel
- Peoplesoft
- MS Dynamics EX
- MS Dynamics CRM
Zeenea “Premium ERP/CRM connectors help companies in various aspects.
Discovering and assessing
Zeenea connectors help companies to build an automatic translation layer, hiding the complexity of the underneath database tables and automatically feeds the Metadata registry with accurate and useful information, saving time and money of the Data Governance Team.
Scoping useful metadata information for specific cases.
In a world with thousands of datasets, Zeenea provides a mean to build accurate and self-sufficient models to serve focused business needs by extracting in a comprehensive way:
- Business and technical names for tables
- Business and technical names for columns in tables
- Relationships between tables
- Data Elements
- Domains
- Views
- Indexes
- Table row count
- Application hierarchy (where available from the package)
Compliance
Zeenea’s “Premium ERP/CRM connectors” are able to identify and tag any personal data or Personal Identifiable Information coming from its supported CRM/ERP packages in its Data Catalog to stick with GDPR/CCPA regulation.
