Analytical Master Data Management: Buzzwords EPM, DRM, BI

Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management (DRM) is being used widely as an Enterprise – Analytical Master Data Management tool. Oracle DRM is a part of the Oracle EPM Middleware and is a completely separate installation.

By separating out the Install of Oracle DRM with other Core EPM product sets Oracle has reached out to several customers in the BI space. DRM’s hierarchy management capabilities are being leveraged by several organizations to master their BI- Analytics data.

I would like to re-iterate the important relationship between BI and Analytical MDM below:

• Business Intelligence systems are designed to help enterprises understand their operations, customer, finances, product performance, trends and other key business measurements.

• Poor BI reporting is attributed to inconsistent, poor data quality of operational information feeding the analytic reports. (oftentimes this refers to the Dimensions in the BI environment, being inconsistent, duplicates – different named unique entries in the operational systems for the same entity etc)

• In order to fix poor quality Analytic reports, the key is to fix the source-poor quality data under the applications that run the business(operational sources). This is master data.

• Solutions that focus on managing dimensions data are called Analytical MDM. They master shared entities such as financial data hierarchies and GLs between multiple Data Warehouses and BI systems across domains in an organization. Analytical MDM is the glue that ties analytical systems to what is happening on the operational side of the business.

• This is where Oracle’s leading Analytical MDM tool – Data Relationship Management fits in.

DRM is a data-agnostic tool, meaning that it will work with any sort of reference data (customer, product, asset, billing etc), from any source system. Information from source systems needs to be imported into DRM in a predefined format using DRM operations.

DRM generates unique Identifiers for each key entity value and is can also be designed to maintain master attributes for each entity value. The export operations in DRM allows DRM to publish the Mastered hierarchy information via flat file exports or to a external RDBMS tables. Consuming systems like BI/Reports can subscribe to these tables. HAL offers other means of linking DRM data to other Fusion products (I need to research integration of DRM with HAL further, will address this in another article)

It is very important to note the unique offerings of DRM.

• Unlike Operation MDM tools where algorithms are applied to do ranking, matching and linking to determine the golden master records, DRM maintains the golden records that has been imported/entered into the tool. Data cleansing is typically done prior to importing data into DRM.

• DRM offers tools for data governance like Versioning, traceability, audit-ability, compare, validations, controlled access to Master data based on role based user profiling/ security