For many years the ambition to create and maintain a single version of the truth in business and data has been plagued by all kinds of problems. It began decades ago when distributed and desktop computing erupted across the enterprise. Centralized control could no longer keep pace with the increased demand for reporting and analysis, and the impact of departmental or business unit transaction applications.
As a result, many silos of information began showing up in all kinds of departments where previously there had been none. As a consequence, new questions were raised about the integrity of the data being reported. Trust in data, or rather the lack of it, became a much talked about issue.
Solutions have come from many angles. Everything from data warehouses, real time reporting, cloud strategies, data quality, data lineage, catalogues and centralized governance have all had an impact. Yet these new platforms have sometimes created problems of their own not least because they can be costly and take time to generate returns. It could also be argued that all they’ve done is introduce more layers of complexity and in some cases simply highly engineered versions of what came before.
The digital age has spawned a much greater need for fact checking across everything from news and social media, politics and central government. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bound to accelerate this even more. AI can and does get things wrong! It’s no wonder everyone needs to be asking; “how do I know what I’m being told or seeing is true?” How, you might be asking in the context of your organization’s data, do ERP or CRM applications add value to the continuous need for verification?
Quite simply, the ERP is a system of record for how your business works and your CRM does the same from a customer centric point of view. Both are at the heart of what supports a business and should, if implemented and used wisely, help power it forward. They have evolved to become one of the most enduring software categories authored and maintained by many of the largest IT & services companies worldwide. They are a rich source of information and reflect how business processes operate. However, whilst their data is vital for the effective running of business operations, customer management, reporting, and governance etc., they often suffer from many of the data quality issues faced by other systems.
How then might you scrutinize and leverage the true facts about your business from your ERP & CRM systems? Indeed, how might you “fact check” your mission critical applications before you start to build new platforms around them?
Firstly, you will need to expose and incorporate data and metadata from extensive and complex data models. This isn’t easy not least because your vendor hasn’t supplied you with any tools to help you do this. Your applications specialists have in all probability moved on. In short, there is no one to help swiftly harvest, discover, curate and integrate the goldmine of information you are going to need. This is where Safyr can help.
Safyr is the leading solution for ERP metadata discovery. In a sense, Safyr will enable fact checking of your ERP. It will find business and technical names for tables, columns, descriptions and relationships between tables. The metadata is harvested as implemented into a repository with all customizations. Safyr also provides a range of search, analysis and sub setting features to easily expose the metadata critical to your project. You no longer need to operate in the dark.
Once you’ve discovered the truth you will want to shout about it! Safyr makes it easy for you to do this. There are multiple ways for you to share the metadata with other platforms or in different formats. This means there is a fast and accurate method for ultimately meeting business demand for reliable data.
Read and learn more information on Safyr.