Data Catalogues Data catalogues have become a fast growing solution to a critical requirement of an enterprise information management strategy. This is the need to document and understand the types and uses of data across the enterprise application landscape. The importance of data catalogues to a data management strategy is emphasised in Gartner’s 2017 Report: […]
In the past we at Silwood have often referred to the ERP and CRM solutions which are the target for our metadata discovery product, Safyr®, as “Black Boxes” in terms of their underlying data models. In this context we are using one of the Oxford Dictionary definitions of a Black Box which is: “A complex […]
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 […]
Introduction to the GDPR personal data challenge Working out where computer systems store Personal Data (PD) data that needs to be reviewed in the context of compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a challenge in any environment. However, it presents even more of a problem where the PII data is in one […]
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, […]
What comes before data extraction? In any data intensive project be it a data warehouse, data migration, master data there is a data discovery phase which has to be completed before any movement of data can be performed. This is what used to be called source data analysis and is in modern parlance more likely […]
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 […]
Introduction to Safyr for Salesforce Salesforce has an easy-to-use data modelling feature in the Schema Builder. This provides a graphical data modelling interface to the Salesforce metadata, allowing the user to choose which Objects to include in the diagram, and with zooming and navigation features. However, when there are a significant number of Custom Objects, […]
This is the latest in our occasional series of data models which we have produced using Safyr®. These give some insight into those common business areas in SAP and ORACLE applications for which an understanding of how the underlying metadata is structured are often required for Information Management projects. It’s a group of tables in the form […]
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 […]
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 […]
Well…er…Yes, and No. We get this comment lots of times. It’s sometimes hard to explain the difference. Strictly speaking, we do ‘metadata discovery’. I like analogies. Imagine I’ve moved to a new town and I want to know the location of the nearest Supermarket, Post Office, ATM, etc. What do I do? I can ask […]
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 […]
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 […]
Metadata is boring and complex and should only be of interest to technical specialists and geeks! Well, that is a commonly held view; however in today’s environment where exploiting data, in the form of Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence and Analytics, Master Data Management, Big Data, Data Governance and even Enterprise Architecture initiatives, is becoming more critical […]
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