As part of implementing business intelligence, enterprises have a need to improve data consistency between their different business divisions and implement a good strategy for master data management. Some business drivers for such need are to gain a better understanding of customer buying patterns, to analyze production costs by product line across several of their manufacturing units, to ensure regulatory standards across the enterprise, to optimize buying/reordering patterns of inventory, etc.

For instance, in a typical scenario of analyzing customer buying patterns, it is imperative that there is consistency in customer information reporting across different divisions and product lines. In addition, there are also multiple applications across the enterprise, each with its own way of representing the same customer (different hierarchical structures, different notations, etc. of representing customer information), which makes it impossible to get a clear picture of the customers' cross-product buying profiles quickly – unless a laborious data-mining exercise is conducted.       

In order to address this need, EMG provides a user-friendly, dynamic infrastructure for dimension and hierarchy management – using its native infrastructure tool called the “EMG Business Context”.

EMG can pull customer data from the various applications in the form of a XML (in real time) or from MSEXCEL (non-real time), map them to a SINGLE desired representation (user defined business context) and keep updating the centralized business context as and when things change in the various systems. This approach gives the power to create a hierarchical representation that is DRIVEN BY THE USERS.

For instance, in the example above, a user may want to evaluate a criteria such as, "in every geography, report on active customer orders, by product code and further by their purchase value." The user can create a business context called “Active Customer Orders Report”, which would have a specific hierarchy as per the requirement above – totally created by the user by means of a drag and drop functionality.

Furthermore, typically, there could be different codes for the same product in different systems – using EMG, the user can create their own COMMON “product name” which maps to all of the different product codes. The business context will have the latest update of information which can be pushed to any third party system or a dashboard based on an event, schedule or a user query.

Using another native utility called the “Consistency Comparator”, Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway compares the values of the data represented in any two different hierarchical representations. For instance, two specific representations in two different systems can be compared and discrepancy reports can be generated on the fly.

Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway is a Business Activity Monitoring product developed and marketed by: Automatika Ltd., 45 St. Clair Ave W, #1102, Toronto, ON, Canada, M4V 1K9. tel: (416) 968-2364; email: clauder@fifthgentech.com