Enterprise Resource Planning Jump-Start Package

Enterprise Resource Planning
Many organizations have invested heavily in the acquisition and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages to streamline specific business functions such as human resource, supply chain, financial, customer, warehouse, and decision support management. The ERP package itself often replaces two or more homegrown applications. The intention is to leverage the cross-functional capability of the package to replace disparate systems and consolidate the data into a single data model.

However, the data models that support these packages contain thousands and thousands of tables and attributes. Understanding where specific data is stored in these packages can be difficult at best. In addition, the names of the tables and attributes are proprietary and often cryptic. Even worse, the relationships between tables and attributes are enforced by the application, not the data structure itself. This creates serious challenges for performing data modeling and data sourcing activities against these packages.

CA, Inc (CA) provides the CA ERwin® Saphir Option (Saphir Option) to resolve this exact issue. The Saphir Option provides access to the metadata within SAP, SAP BW, PeopleSoft Enterprise, PeopleSoft Enterprise One (formerly J.D. Edwards OneWorld) and Siebel environments. The Saphir Option's interface allows the user to browse and search through the metadata to locate the data of interest. Once the appropriate metadata has been located the user can export the metadata into the CA ERwin® Data Modeler (ERwin) product for data modeling activities. The ERwin models created from the Saphir Option metadata include the proprietary names for the objects in the physical model, but the logical model contains the true business names for the table. This facilitates the user being able to perform modeling activities using the logical model containing the business metadata instead of the cryptic proprietary metadata from the ERP. Data Innovations, Inc. provides a jump-start package to establish a data modeling environment that leverages ERwin and the Saphir Option.

Jump-Start Package
Data Innovations' Saphir jump-start package establishes the environment to support data modeling against your ERP package. The following sections identify the components of the package:

Requirements:
The jump-start package will require the following:

These requirements allow Data Innovations to provide discounts for both software licenses and professional services.

Product Installation:
The ERwin and Saphir Option software will need to be installed. The following bullets identify the components of this service:

  • A custom installation plan for ERwin and Saphir is created.
  • Perform the product installations and create detailed installation procedures for both products.
  • Install the license files.
  • Establish the Saphir Option environment. The Saphir Option includes a relational database to capture the metadata from the ERP for analysis:
    • Create the Saphir database in the selected RDBMS.
    • Configure the Saphir database.
    • Establish connectivity to the ERP.
    • Extract and load the metadata from the ERP into the Saphir repository.

ERP Data Modeling Services:
Data Innovations provides expert services to guide the client to success and ensures the return on investment for the Saphir Option software. Our experts work closely with the client to identify and extract the appropriate metadata from the ERP for data modeling efforts. The primary deliverables from this engagement are the new ERP data modeling environment and the ERwin data models that contain the extracted metadata from the ERP. These models are ideal for mapping, impact analysis, sourcing for data warehousing or other BI efforts, and other data modeling activities.