Jon Marius Roald
Data Lake's ability to let you collect and analyze vast amounts of information quickly has made it essential for M3 users. Here are some tips on how to make it even more powerful.
For the uninitiated, Data Lake is Infor’s data repository that allows cloud customers of M3 to have SQL-like access to their data. Before cloud suite, most clients installed M3 directly on their servers, with their own database, which gave them full access to their M3 data.
– That meant users could write SQL-queries to easily report on and analyze real-time M3 information. Customers using the cloud suite no longer have this direct access to M3 data, says Scott Slusher, senior consultant at Vince.
Enter Data Lake. It works as a copy of the M3 data and allows users to interact with their data as if it was on their own server. Users can execute SQL queries on the Data Lake, as well as combine the M3 data with information from other systems like Salesforce and Shopify, enabling advanced analytics and integrations.
Still, there are two caveats: it is read-only, and it is not real-time information.
– APIs are really bad at looking for stuff that isn’t there. With Data Lake, it is much easier to look for missing information
Scott Slusher, senior consultant at Vince
From information to action
Data Lake’s main limitation is the lack of actionability. You can view, compile and analyze, but you can not make any changes. More and more people are now discovering that Vince is a great tool for bridging this gap, explains Slusher.
– With Vince, you can use the Data Lake feature to create complex search workflows, and then combine these with M3 API workflows to act on the information gathered from Data Lake. This makes it effortless to both discover errors and make the necessary adjustments, he says.
An example would be searching for items with missing data, for example items whose net weight or gross weight is empty.
– This is a cumbersome task with APIs, but a fairly simple Data Lake query. With Vince you can download this information directly to your spreadsheet, add values to the empty fields, and upload the new data back to M3 with a simple click of a button, the Vince consultant elaborates.
Better together
Vince combines the power of Data Lake with the actionability of APIs, letting you utilize Data Lake to its full potential. Vince allows users to go beyond viewing data by enabling direct corrections and updates via Excel – a familiar and user friendly user interface to most.
On top of that, you can schedule and automate tasks and enable alerts and notifications about errors.
