Sharing Metadata Between OneStream, Data Warehouse, and ERPs

Aligning metadata across your enterprise resource planning (ERP), corporate performance management (CPM), and a data warehouse helps ensure the right metadata is in the right place at the right time, preventing failed transactions and unreliable business data.

However, traditional metadata management processes are inefficient and prone to error, which can lead to missing, inaccurate, or incomplete metadata in one or more of your business systems. These legacy processes also lack validation and governance capabilities, which further increases the risk of introducing poor-quality metadata into critical business systems.

The cost of poor data quality can be high. A 2019 study from Dun & Bradstreet examined the impact of bad data practices on business outcomes. The study found that due to incomplete or inaccurate customer information:

• Twenty (20) percent of the businesses surveyed lost a customer.
• Twenty-two (22) percent had inaccurate financial forecasts.
• Seventeen (17) percent lost revenue because they offered too much credit to a customer.

Incorporating a unified master data management and data governance platform can help ensure your metadata is correct and consistent across every transaction in every application.

Let’s take a deeper dive into how an all-in-one solution can simplify metadata sharing across a leading CPM platform such as OneStream, a data warehouse, and an ERP to prevent data quality issues from impacting business outcomes.

The Traditional Approach to Sharing Metadata Between Systems

A surprising number of enterprises continue to handle metadata change requests manually. In many cases, system admins receive Excel templates via email from business users or use SharePoint to capture metadata change requests.

The admins then manually validate members and/or properties for approval. Because requests go back and forth with business users for clarification, approval requests can be ignored or lost, and changes are made without validation for all subscribing applications, this approach is time-consuming and leaves plenty of room for errors.

Another approach is to link systems using interface tables from ERP to CPM or from a data warehouse to CPM applications. This process is also inefficient and prone to inaccuracies because interface tables do not always intelligently populate all attributes or validate all governance rules. CPM metadata has different properties than ERP, and frequently needs additional enrichment for a record to calculate or aggregate properly.

A More Accessible, Accurate, and Reliable Approach to Sharing Metadata

Centralizing metadata before sharing it between ERP, OneStream, and a data warehouse streamlines the change request process. This approach helps ensure metadata is accessible, accurate, and trustworthy by:

• Creating a single source of truth
• Enabling self-service metadata changes
• Establishing workflow and governance for reviews and approvals
• Supporting real-time functional and technical validations

Entering metadata into a centralized hub where it is reviewed, approved, and validated prior to deployment prevents common scenarios such as:

• A cost center was not created before raising the invoice, the transaction fails when data is loaded.
• A cost center was created in the ERP but was missed in OneStream and the data warehouse, causing a reconciliation error between systems.
• A cost center was added with a slight variation of the member name in the ERP and a different member name in OneStream, so data is loaded to different member names and causes reconciliation errors.

How EPMware Can Help Take Control of Metadata Changes

In many organizations, sharing metadata between your ERPs, CPM, and data warehouse is typically done manually and without governance. This creates metadata that is prone to errors and not audit friendly. Untrustworthy metadata is of no practical use to the average business user.

EPMware’s unified master data management and data governance platform is built to empower business users by centralizing, integrating, validating, and governing metadata across your ERPs, CPM, and data warehouse.

EPMware eliminates the need to manually communicate metadata changes using Excel, SharePoint, or other homegrown tools. Our centralized, integrated workflow engine automatically routes change requests to the appropriate reviewers for approval and enrichment before being deployed to the target systems with a single click.

This all-in-one master data management and data governance platform creates efficiencies in the change request process by centralizing, validating, and governing master data across all the applications that need to share it.

EPMware’s business adapters create a seamless, out-of-the-box integration with many of the most widely used EPM, CPM, and ERP applications, including OneStream, Oracle Hyperion EPM, SAP, OneStream, Workday, and Salesforce solutions. 

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