Can your enterprise data catalog or metadata management system truly be called ‘enterprise’ if it cannot readily accommodate metadata from your enterprise application systems?
Have you ever wondered how to go about provisioning your enterprise data catalog or metadata management solution with information from your enterprise applications such as those from SAP, Oracle, Salesforce or Microsoft?
It may seem that this should be a simple and straightforward process as it is with many other data sources. Your vendors may even suggest that their software solution can achieve this easily. Or, that it will be a task their consultants and your technical specialists can accomplish quickly and without difficulty.
We have technical and / or commercial partnerships with many of the leading enterprise data catalog and metadata management vendors. This means that their customers can use Safyr to provision their solutions with ERP and CRM metadata from their systems, as implemented, quickly and accurately.
If your vendor does not have a solution for this task then you are risking the delivery of your project.
The reality is that this is not a simple challenge to overcome without specialist capabilities. If you have already tried to do this you may have realised how complex, time consuming and costly this can be to complete. It may even delay or derail your project.
There are some initial questions to answer when you consider provisioning your solution with metadata from these types of systems.
For example, do you really need to import all the tables and attributes from those applications? Whilst this is certainly possible, do you want tables which contain no data or are intermediate tables and contain no transactional data? A typical SAP ECC or S/4HANA system contains about 100,000 tables and 1 million attributes. Is it all appropriate for your data catalog?
Or, do you want to be able to select those tables which represent specific business functions or groupings? For example, Bill of Materials, Product Master, Customers, Sales, General Ledger etc. This might be more useful for your business users than having to guess which tables they need, or wade through a lot of results from searches. How will you be able to create the relevant subsets required for this?
How will the solution identify and synchronise with changes to your source metadata? This changes regularly in some applications, for example SAP BW or Salesforce. How will they be identified and incorporated?
These questions are more difficult to answer because the useful metadata, by which I mean usable table and attribute descriptions rather than physical names, relationships and other information, is not easy to find. It is not in the application’s database system catalog so a database scanner or connector is of no value.
In addition, the quantity and complexity of the metadata involved means that it is almost impossible to create business relevant subsets unless you have access to specialist metadata curation software.
Finally, it is also important to know how you can populate your enterprise data catalog with data from your application systems and keep it synchronized with changes to the sources?
If you have, or are considering, or implementing an enterprise metadata management or data catalog from one of our partner solutions you can explore how our product Safyr allows you to successfully curate and ingest metadata from your SAP, Oracle, Salesforce or Microsoft applications.
If you would like to know which vendor companies we work with, please contact us and we will be pleased to respond.
Alternatively if you would like more information about how Safyr solves the challenges of exploiting ERP and CRM metadata in your data catalog please download the White Paper, The Three Challenges of ERP Metadata for Data Governance
Or, take a look at our introductory video about Safyr.