Located in the midwest, this BIG10 school is renowned for its groundbreaking engineering innovations over the years, and a popular athletic program. Its IT department is known for its path-breaking technology adoptions, which are often well ahead of their times, in the higher education field.
In another of its left field technology adoptions, this university chose an up-and-coming project management system - Procore - to manage new projects aimed at improving campus facilities. Their existing operations were mostly streamlined through their SAP ECC ERP application. This project was aimed at integrating data flow between their project management system Procore and SAP ECC.
The adoption of Procore, a project management system (application catering to the engineering & construction / project management space) meant that the creation of a data silo was imminent. Though Procore allowed for the efficient management of construction projects on campus, it needed important financial data (from SAP ECC), in order to maintain cost codes, and manage overall project costing information. Another business requirement was the transfer of change event information from Procore to SAP ECC. Change events occurred frequently in their construction projects, and the data flow was currently not integrated.
Every business user was currently doing data entry twice, once in Procore and once in SAP ECC. They needed a plug & play integration solution to ensure the data flow was streamlined, and ready in real-time.
The data models for financials, change events, cost codes, etc. are starkly different in Procore and in SAP ECC. The first challenge was to identify the data models, and unify them through the use of dataZap’s templates.
Next, data quality management had become a big worry, and the dual entry was causing data corruption at an alarming rate. Users needed specific business rules to be put in place so that any erroneous data can be flagged, and corrected before the data integration is complete.
Procore offers webhooks, while SAP ECC offers BAPIs for integrations. Though dataZap provides an 80% baseline, the remaining 20% had to be configured to meet specific data quality and data mapping needs. Oftentimes, the way the users end up using the application can be quite different from how it was designed to be used. This created a data mapping scenario that was unique to the university.
Lastly, the university required data transfer in real time. While this was a new capability that Procore was developing, dataZap’s engines were ready to consume both Procore’s webhooks and SAP’s BAPIs in real time. Providing real time business insights was the ultimate goal.
ChainSys was able to implement an end-to-end integration solution for the university in 6 weeks. This was unprecedented, both for the university as well as for IT teams at Procore, who initially thought a 6 week timeline would be too close for comfort. In the end, we were able to go-live as promised.
Needless to say, the accelerated timeline was aided by dataZap’s preconfigured templates, which covered 80% of transformation, mapping, data quality, extraction and loading requirements.
The additional 20% were configured (on dataZap’s code-free platform), to fit the university’s unique needs.
Here’s a look at the end-to-end solution that was implemented.
As you can see above, dataZap leveraged webhooks from Procore, and BAPIs from SAP ECC for the integration. The templates, along with the DQM engine ensured that the data flowing between the systems was clean & compatible. Overall, a cleanly designed integration.
Some of the benefits included:
dataZap - Pre-Configured Templates & Migration Engine to Extract, Transform, Pre-Validate, Load, Reconcile & Report.
