In today’s highly complex business landscapes, metadata management plays a critical role in helping enterprises effectively manage and leverage their data assets.
Ensuring metadata is accurate and reliable across the organization leads to improved data governance, data-driven decision-making, business intelligence, compliance, and innovation.
Let’s take a closer look at why metadata management is important and how one company transformed its metadata management processes to reduce complexity.
At the enterprise level, the quality of your metadata management approach has far-reaching implications.
Metadata management defines data standards and validation rules, which improves data quality and provides more accurate insights and intelligence.
The quality of your analysis is only as good as the data you use to prepare it, so ensuring metadata is accurate and up-to-date is critical to the analytics and reporting processes.
A well-planned metadata management strategy helps maintain compliance with data protection regulations, industry requirements, and internal policies.
Align metadata management with data governance by properly classifying, tagging, and documenting data to maintain integrity and comply with data governance policies.
Metadata management helps eliminate data redundancy, which reduces storage costs and minimizes wasted IT resources.
Metadata management optimizes data integration efforts by providing visibility into your data’s lineage, quality, and dependencies.
Metadata management enhances data discoverability by providing comprehensive information about the data assets within the organization. This enables employees to quickly and easily find the data they need to make informed decisions, develop new products, or optimize operations.
Metadata management preserves and documents data context and history, which provides insight into the evolution of products, customer relationships, and business processes.
At Trane Technologies (formerly Ingersoll Rand), executing change request deployments used to take days.
The company’s finance team was running five Hyperion applications, including Essbase, HFM, FDMee, and two different planning applications.
They handled workflow via Excel and SharePoint, and change approvals were done manually using an SQL staging environment to control mapping and DRM for metadata management.
Eventually, Trane Technologies replaced all of the Hyperion applications with OneStream Smart CPM (an EPMware technology partner), but it’s safe to say that the company had a complexity problem.
At the time, Trane relied on time-consuming and error-prone manual processes at three critical stages in the change request workflow:
During the time-consuming Excel-based deployment process, approved metadata was converted into DRM bulk import and then manually imported from DRM to the target applications.
The team submitted change requests manually via an Excel template attached to a SharePoint request. The governance team would physically reach out to reviewers—often more than once—to remind them to submit approvals and keep the request moving.
A single full-time employee would review the change requests and manually validate and scrub the metadata to verify that the properties were scripted correctly.
As Trane’s environment became more complex, it began looking for a new metadata management solution to replace DRM.
The team evaluated Oracle DRG and EDMCS, but they wanted a solution that aligned better with their requirements and offered seamless integrations to keep HFM, Essbase, PBCS, OAC, and R12 in sync.
EPMware was able to help Trane achieve these goals and streamline its metadata management and data governance processes.
Read the full success story here.
EPMware simplified Trane’s complex change management processes with out-of-the-box adapters, standard request scripting, and automated dimension and property mapping that enabled users to make a change in one application and automatically sync that change across all of their applications.
Customized workflows allow Trane to layer in review and approval stages as needed. The web-based interface lets the governance team follow the progress of a request through each step and create an audit trail.
EPMware’s real-time validations ensure all necessary information is entered at the point of request. If any information is missing, the request cannot be submitted until the error is fixed. Full loop-back capabilities read all the log files from the target app and then display whether or not the request was successful inside EPMware.
With EPMware, change requests that used to take days can be completed in about two minutes per application.
But EPMware didn’t just transform the technology Trane Technologies used to manage metadata. EPMware empowered Trane’s business users to own the request process—because you don’t have to be a systems expert to ensure your organization’s business systems have access to consistent, accurate, and validated metadata.
Click here to learn more about enterprise metadata management and how EPMware helps ensure your metadata data is correct and consistent across every application in every system.