If you have been using enterprise ERP and CRM systems for a long time, you know that they have a vast organizational impact. Your organization has invested heavily in these systems, and they continuously generate valuable operational and transactional data. This data is essential to power analytics and support critical business decisions. You need a reliable way of getting it with the right business context.
As you move towards data catalogs to leverage your data assets effectively, you want all your metadata in one place. But unlocking metadata from your ERP and CRM systems is not easy. By nature of their design and scope, ERP and CRM systems have large and complex data models and are frequently customized — which means that standard extraction tools struggle to identify and import relevant tables from these systems. You will likely have to use custom methods to extract metadata from these systems, which are costly and inefficient.
ERP/CRM metadata challenges
Unlocking metadata from ERP and CRM systems presents three significant challenges.
- Discovering and extracting: The ERP or CRM databases’ schema may not provide meaningful metadata, and scanning the extensive tables is not efficient. Simply importing all the tables may be counterproductive, as many of them will provide little value. Some metadata may be opaque or hidden behind a complex API. Different vendors may also have various data dictionaries, and discovering metadata is the first hurdle you will face.
- Understanding and analyzing: If you manage to discover and extract the metadata, the next obstacle is understanding the relationships between tables, views, and domains. At this stage, you need an efficient tool to analyze the metadata across all versions and instances of your ERP or CRM system, to arrive at the right scoping for the data catalog.
- Delivering to data catalogs: Importing metadata into data catalogs is often not viable, given the complex nature of ERP or CRM metadata. You also need to be fully aware of the data structures of data catalogs to ensure correct mapping. A faster and cost-effective option is an automated exporting tool that can scope and deliver to data catalogs accurately.
What if you have a comprehensive solution that seamlessly ingests metadata from ERP or CRM systems into data catalogs? What if you need not intervene at any stage and let it manage itself completely? What if this solution cuts your days of metadata extraction and delivery into just hours?
Collibra’s ERP/CRM Integrator does precisely that to quickly unlock the value of the data in your enterprise applications.
Collibra’s ERP/CRM Integrator
With the Integrator, you can seamlessly discover and extract metadata from your ERP and CRM, including descriptions for tables, fields, relationships, and much more. The volume of metadata from these systems is typically large, and you may not need to bring all the metadata into your data catalog. You can leverage the search, analyze, and filter features of the Integrator to create subject areas aligned to your business requirements.
- The customer uses subject areas as a base for further analysis, comparison, visualization, or exporting directly into Collibra Data Catalog.
- Subject areas offer flexibility to realign the metadata as your business requirements keep changing. What works for ERP may not directly help in planning the marketing strategy, for example, and you can choose to focus only on specific metadata subsets.
- Subject areas can be as broad or narrow as you need and can contain as many tables from the systems as you want.
Once you have well-defined subject areas, delivering the accurate metadata from subject areas into Collibra Data Catalog is super reliable via REST API. The Integrator works fast and scales easily so that the customer completes the entire process in less than a few hours. The ERP and CRM metadata provisioned in the catalog can enhance your analytics and provide deeper insights.
Practically speaking, metadata extraction is not a one-time activity. The metadata in your enterprise systems is not static and can change over time to respond to changing business scenarios. You may also want to redefine the subject areas when working with different objectives. In such situations, the extracted metadata in the Collibra Data Catalog need not become obsolete, as you can run the Integrator to quickly re-extract the metadata. What’s more, you can compare both the instances to track and comply with governance practices.
Collibra’s ERP/CRM Integrator ensures that metadata from all your critical enterprise systems is in one place, making the management and access very efficient. Automated delivery and rich features save you time while the intuitive interface offers you a superior experience.
Rest easy knowing that your ERP and CRM metadata is no longer locked into the systems. Delivered efficiently to the centralized Collibra Data Catalog, it can successfully drive your growth and innovation strategy.
