What lies beneath?

Moving data in or out of an ERP or CRM system requires a knowledge of what lies beneath. Getting an understanding of the underlying data structures, data dictionary or decoding opaque table/field names is essential for enterprise data modelling or mapping.Safyr quickly surfaces the information you need: which tables exist in the packaged application; how they are related; and, in most packages, which application functions use which tables. This is particularly helpful if the source or target is an extremely constrained data environment requiring a filtering process to determine:

  • what data in the CRM or ERP really is relevant and useful; and
  • which is bad data, which you need to eradicate or resolve.

Slice the elephant

Generally, the industry-standard ERP & CRM applications you have now extracted metadata and data model information from, have high volumes of data wrapped up in complex (and sometimes impenetrable) data models. Even with the metadata or information you need, this is definitely an elephant that needs slicing!

To organise the metadata and be able to place it in the context of relationships between tables and other objects, applications, or entities, the task of curation needs breaking up into manageable subsets. But in large and complex data models navigation is difficult.

A typical SAP system has over 90,000 tables; a typical JD Edwards application has over 5,000; a Siebel CRM deployment 3,000 tables – the point of origin is lost by the time you find the destination! So a specialist tool like Safyr is incredibly helpful in de-scaling these tasks by sub-setting metadata – in addition to its other powerful capabilities.

Compare and contrast

Safyr can also assist with determining precedence should you have multiple instances of an application package. These can arise from underlying cloud infrastructure requirements (as in Microsoft); regional differences or following acquisition of another company which used a different version of the package. Consolidating or rationalising multiple DB instances is effectively a data quality process but deciding which data to use, in what order and according to what precedence is a task that Safyr’s visual appraisal and comparison can simplify.

Safyr has functionality designed to make the identification of differences quick and easy within large enterprise datasets, such as are typically the case in ERP or CRM packaged applications. The useful comparison feature can be configured to also pick out the kinds of differences that are important to the user e.g. personally identifiable data.

Find & control

Important control data may be located within ERP & CRM packages. So delivering successfully on a data inventory; a catalogue; gathering control data sources for business resilience, or building a knowledge platform means that at some point, this information requirement has to be addressed. That can be really testing if you are conducting a migration, merging several data sources together in the load process. You need to know which dataset, table or field takes precedence.

Here, Safyr helps you quickly, precisely and explicitly identify control data items such as ‘customer’ or ‘product’ through intelligent search features dedicated to each application package.