Marijn Westeneng
Let’s suppose you want to bake a cake. You buy some flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder, butter, and milk. You just mix them all in to make the cake batter and place it in the oven. After about 30 minutes, you have something that looks like a cake and even “almost” tastes like one. Except, the cake is jiggly, it’s so sweet that it gives you a headache, and it just won’t come off the pan!
Turns out you didn’t really have a recipe to understand how much of each ingredient to use and when to add them in the process. And that impacts the end result. You learn the hard way that, perhaps, having a recipe would have given you a clear roadmap and saved time and money. The same applies to data.
Imagine data as your cake and the ingredients as your data tables, except that your data cake is made up of tens of thousands of ingredients (data tables). That’s exactly why you need data modeling. It helps you create a roadmap to find and process the right data to trigger actionable insights and enable smart decisions.
But, what exactly is a data modeling solution and why do organizations need it?
At STAEDEAN, we’re passionate about solving complex business problems for our clients. We empower them with our deep domain expertise and innovative solutions such Data Integration Solution for Dynamics 365 F&SCM, which simplifies data preparation and extraction for analytics. Therefore, we believe that helping you understand what a data modeling solution is and how it can help organizations will enable you to leverage it for greater business benefits.
In this article, we will discuss:
A data modeling solution is one that enables faster and more efficient modeling of data. But, what exactly are data modeling and a data model?
Data modeling is the process of creating a data model, which is a plan to define what data you need to collect and how to store it. It is about evaluating, understanding, and refining your data requirements to visually describe your business and creating data flows to streamline the processes.
A data modeling solution helps you easily connect your data with multi-layered data models. It also simplifies and accelerates the process of creating a database, all while minimizing manual errors. Additionally, with a data modeling solution, you are better equipped to develop a high-quality database that can produce insightful reports for each of the parties involved. Consequently, you reduce time and effort in maintenance and task execution and improve your chances of success.
Today’s modern businesses are driven by data and with tons of it available, organizing it for the right use and at the right time becomes crucial. And, that’s when organizations can use a data modeling software like Data Integration Solution for D365 F&SCM, that can help leverage their data optimally to create and implement a reliable data strategy. It helps grasp the product design and its core business logic, thus aiding cross-functional collaboration.
The five benefits of a data modeling solution in the next section will explain in detail why organizations increasingly need one today.
When you set out to migrate to the cloud or develop software without a clear roadmap, your chances of success reduce drastically. Data modeling is like a blueprint of your cloud migration or software development project that you need to have in place before implementation. This map is used as a common source when collecting data, thus ensuring the overall data quality, including consistency and accuracy.
The process of gathering and storing data becomes easy to manage, extend, and scale with data models. A data modeling software enables you to collect the right business data requirements and set rules to ensure the required processes are on track. It visually displays the overall data scenario to everyone in your organization. This facilitates the identification of the bottlenecks, limitations, and opportunities in the processes, thus improving them continuously.
A data modeling solution enables organizations to identify errors early on in the process, allowing for faster development of the application. It supports effective and easy communication among your teams, thus eliminating distraction, confusion, or errors from having to figure out requirements as you go along. As a result, it substantially reduces the time to produce feature-rich software or ensure a successful cloud migration.
It’s a given that organizations have tons of data, but how effectively are they using it? A data modeling software ensures the effective use of data in establishing smarter business intelligence (BI) in your organization.
A data modeling software allows you to create your underlying business guidelines directly. With complete visibility into the rules, you are likely to experience lesser rework during the project implementation. How exactly so?
For one, clarity on requirements bridges the gap between true business needs and project implementation/product development. Furthermore, it also helps you detect and fix errors quickly. Therefore, it enables you to complete your projects in much less time and effort. And, ultimately, you save nearly 70% of the total spend on programming.
If you’re wondering whether your organization needs a data modeling software, here are some pointers to help you with a quick evaluation.
If you would like to consider a software built within Dynamics 365 F&SCM that can help you model, clean, transform, and combine your data, and ensure faster data preparation for analytics, check out our Data Integration Solution factsheet below for more information about our solution's data modeling capabilities.
