Unit4 rolls out Data Hub in its cloud-based ERP solution

Unit4 has launched a new Data Hub offering. As part of the firm’s ERP services, it aims to reduce the complexity of extracting data and managing connections between analytics tools.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) refers to software systems that organisations use to manage and integrate core daily processes like accounting, supply chain, manufacturing, and HR. ERP software consolidates these into a single centralised database, rather than using separate, disconnected programmes – helping to unify workflows and plan for business change without dealing with siloed information and responsibilities.

Unit4’s ERPx offering is a cloud-based ERP platform, designed for people-centric organisations (such as public sector agencies and higher education) and project-based business such as professional services groups and consulting firms.

As Unit4 continues to enhance its ERP platform, it has rolled out Data Hub – a managed extraction layer built into Unit4’s ERP system, aimed at enabling organisations to access real-time insights and respond faster in an increasingly competitive environment. According to Unit4, this addresses two key limitations of traditional ERP data analysis, which typically relies on IT teams to manually schedule data exports before reformatting and loading the data into business intelligence tools.

Two problems

As data becomes more complex, for example a General Ledger table, extractions become harder to complete reliably and require ongoing maintenance whenever the schema changes. One problem this causes, is that if issues are encountered with the exporting of data, the report will be erroneous. But if the schema changes to counter this, the pipeline breaks. The alternative relies on extracting data through APIs, which are subject to rate limits, pagination constraints and payload size restrictions.

“In the automation era, an organisation’s data is its competitive advantage,” said Jennifer Sherman, chief product officer, Unit4. “Unit4 is proud to be in a position to help our clients take advantage of their wealth of knowledge and insights. Data Hub makes the extraction and management of data connectivity Unit4’s challenge, not yours, so you can devote time to what really matters to your organisation.”

The approach

According to Unit4, Data Hub ensures that clients maintain high-volume data access, without API limits – “purpose-built for bulk, analytical workloads rather transaction-by-transaction API calls.”

While data stays current, as it is automated to refresh on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending on subscription rather having to maintain scheduled export jobs, and schema versioning is also regularly updated, as part of the software-as-a-service model, Data Hub is maintained by Unit4’s ERPx service, so data connections are designed to survive platform updates.

Speaking on the service, Chris Dixon, finance systems manager at Unit4 client Butlins, commented, “Data Hub was easy to set up and provided us with the tools to feed the data into our reporting models. “This improved our productivity as we no longer had to download data from the system into Excel to feed manually into our reporting models. All the reporting objects we need to report against are available in the tool.”