Data Governance and Data From ERP/CRM Packages: A Must Have

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, and improve profitability, competitiveness, and customer engagement, they have to become data-driven.

In addition to the need to leverage 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, and 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 Metadata 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.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. Our data platform simplifies how people connect, manage, and analyze data across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. With decades of experience in data management and analytics, Actian delivers high-performance solutions that empower businesses to make data-driven decisions. Actian is recognized by leading analysts and has received industry awards for performance and innovation. Our teams share proven use cases at conferences (e.g., Strata Data) and contribute to open-source projects. On the Actian blog, we cover topics ranging from real-time data ingestion, data analytics, data governance, data management, data quality, data intelligence to AI-driven analytics.