

SAP and its metadata Like most companies who have been required to incorporate SAP data into Information or Data Management projects, I am sure you have also experienced the delays, high costs and even data inaccuracies which often occur. Much of this results from the nature of SAP and its metadata. Without an easy and […]
Introduction If you have ever travelled on the London Underground you may have heard the phrase “Mind The Gap” being announced on certain stations, or perhaps you’ve seen the sign on the platform edge. The reason is that in some stations where the platform is curved the distance between the carriage and platform is wider […]
Introduction You have probably noticed how much attention is being placed in your enterprise to optimise the use of, or “monetise”, the data that flows through your organisation’s IT systems. One of the problems associated with this of course is that it is likely that some of the information you want to include for this will […]
It’s probably no surprise that you are noticing an increased focus on the management, governance and exploitation of the data your organisation collects and stores. Why is this? Firstly governments and regulatory bodies across the globe are imposing ever more stringent rules on how you look after data. Think GDPR, CCPA in California, MiFID for […]
Data management, GDPR and the status quo We have just released the latest version of Safyr® which contains new features which have been largely driven by the need to deliver ERP or CRM metadata for GDPR. Whilst Safyr has been available for many years and has been used by hundreds of organisations, there are those who […]
Do you really need to discover Microsoft Dynamics AX metadata? The answer is a definite “Yes”, because as one of the world’s most implemented ERP/CRM packaged solutions for large and medium sized enterprises it suffers from the same metadata challenge as SAP, Oracle, and increasingly Salesforce systems. (According to Panorama Consulting Solutions’ most recent survey, […]
Top 3 Data Integration mistakes I saw a fascinating post by David Linthicum on the Informatica Blog recently in which he discussed the Top 3 Data Integration mistakes which companies make and how to avoid them. One of these is essentially being unable to answer the question ‘Where’s the data and what does it mean?’ For the sake […]
new supported package for safyr We’ve been working hard on a new capability for Safyr®. This is in the form of a metadata extraction feature to enable customers to quickly and intuitively access and exploit the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 data model. As a result we are adding a new package to our list of […]
data modeL Of all the blogs we’ve written here at Silwood, by far the most popular are the ones that are about specific Data Models for SAP, Salesforce and Oracle packages (JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, Siebel and PeopleSoft). We’ve done a number of these over the last year or two. For example we wrote about […]
It was interesting to read the announcement about Salesforce’s latest price hike which amounted to about 40% here in the UK and about 20% in the US. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/23/salesforce_uk_40_per_cent_price_hike/) Much of the rationale for the increase is based on the additional functionality now built into the product by Salesforce which makes it even more valuable to […]
Often when I’m at conferences, parties and networking events I get asked “so what do you do?” If it’s someone that I think has a real interest in our market, I will normally give them the benefit of my ‘elevator pitch’. For a Brit, the term ‘elevator pitch’ is in some ways very misleading. Firstly, […]
Introduction The theme at Enterprise Data World 2016 is “transforming to a data driven business” and Silwood Technology are delighted to be sponsoring the event again this year. This is a broad subject that covers a multitude of disciplines, for example, data governance, enterprise information management, master data, business intelligence and analytics as well as data […]
big data’s little jobs I happened across an interesting article by David Gee recently. It was entitled “A guide to the little jobs that will make big data work.” (http://www.itnews.com.au/blogentry/a-guide-to-the-little-jobs-that-will-make-big-data-work-409655) What I found particularly noteworthy, not to mention refreshing, was the acknowledgement of the importance of metadata in a big data project. This is not […]
Understanding data models in SAP BW is a challenge Here is another in our occasional series of data models. This one is a little different, in that it is about SAP Business Warehouse (BW). Part of the reason I’ve done BW this time is that we get a lot of demand for this capability. Despite […]
PeopleSoft Financials data model Here is another in our occasional series of data models of those common business areas in SAP and ORACLE applications for which data models are often required for Information Management projects. This time it is a set of tables in the form of a data model from a PeopleSoft Financials system, […]
Today’s blog is about the Comparison features in Safyr®. This is an area of the product that may be not as widely used or understood as we’d like, however it’s very powerful, so this is an attempt to redress that. The feature is actually called ‘Compare Subject Areas’ – the idea being to export metadata […]
WHat exactly is a data lake? Recently I have been attending some vendor webinars on Big Data, Data Lake strategy, Hadoop in the context of Data Warehousing and Analytics in an attempt to gain a clearer understanding both of the technology platforms available and more importantly some knowledge of the use cases and benefits a […]
This is the latest in an occasional series of data models which will give some insight into those common business areas in SAP and ORACLE applications for which data models are often required for Information Management projects. It’s a group of tables in the form of a data model from an Oracle Enterprise Business Suite system showing a […]
This is an interesting blog by Steve Lucas, President of Platform Solutions at SAP. https://blogs.saphana.com/2014/11/12/a-roadmap-for-simple/ The first paragraph reads: “Our CEO, Bill McDermott, has thrown down the gauntlet on enterprise complexity so to speak and issued a challenge to every single SAP employee: Make our valuable products and solutions simple to understand, simple to discover, simple […]
We’ve been surprised (pleasantly I might add) at the response we have received to the introduction of Safyr’s capability to reverse engineer metadata from Salesforce systems. It is rapidly becoming our second most popular ‘package’, SAP of course being number one. Why should this be? All the other environments we support (SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle […]
As many of you will know, using Safyr® we can pull metadata from a range of ERP and CRM products, including SAP, Salesforce and PeopleSoft. Customers often ask about other packaged applications that they have implemented. “Can you also do XYZ product?”, and our answer used to be “No – we can only do the […]
This is the latest in an occasional series of data models based upon the packaged application we support with our Safyr product. It is an example of modelling Salesforce application tables with Safyr. Many of our customers and partners are increasingly using Salesforce as an enterprise system of record and of course with the addition […]
I have been reading quite a lot recently about the applicability of Agile methodologies for Data Warehousing amongst other initiatives and it appears to me that often the topic of source data analysis is under-represented in the literature and blogs so I thought I would discuss the subject of application metadata in an Agile data […]
This is the third in a series of data models drawn from the various ERP and CRM systems for which Safyr delivers rapid, accurate and usable metadata. Previously on this blog we’ve produced a Bill of Materials model from a SAP system and an Accounts Payable model from a JDEdwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 system. This model […]
We’ve been providing a solution to get metadata out of ERP and CRM applications for quite a few years now and a common question over that period has been some variation of: “It’s great what you do for SAP (PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc…) – now tell me, can you do the same for our other packaged […]
We’re going to be adding Safyr® for Salesforce capability to our product in the next release (due June 2014) so I wanted to give a taste of what this will deliver. Salesforce is much smaller than SAP or the Oracle apps in terms of the number of tables, but can still be challenging to understand […]
According to a recent report by leading analyst firm Gartner, heavily customised ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems will have achieved the status of ‘legacy ERP,’ by 2016. In addition they suggest that as more agile, flexible competitors enter the market and mature, CIO’s will need to plan on what to do with their ‘legacy ERPs’. […]
This is the second in an occasional series of data models which will give some insight into those common business areas in SAP and ORACLE applications for which data models are often required for Information Management projects. It’s a set of tables in the form of a data model from a JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 system showing the […]
A few months ago I was at a meeting with a customer who was involved with a BI project that was pulling data from an SAP system into a Data Mart. One of the people at the meeting was very experienced in the ETL tool the customer was using for this project. We were showing […]
We are in the process of providing content which will give some insight into those common business areas in SAP and ORACLE applications, for which data models are often required for Information Management projects. The first one I have created is a data model of the SAP tables used in the BOM Explosion process. The model was created following some analysis in […]
I picked up on a great blog by Jonathan Haun, Consulting Manager, Decision First Technologies recently where he talked at some length about the Data Modelling aspects of SAP HANA, click here to link through to it. I commented back that I felt that HANA projects needed to go through a data source discovery phase […]
I’m always looking for new ways to explain what I do for a living. It’s made hard by the fact that it centres on a product that doesn’t do anything quite like any other tool in the ‘data’ space – which is to make it fast and easy to navigate the data models of […]
I realise this might be controversial but I do believe it. IT professionals have long talked about Process Modelling as the way to understand what a complex system does, while Data Modelling tends to be seen as the ‘Cinderella’ of the modelling world. But Process is merely the moving around of data. When all […]
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