Comments on: Silver Creek Systems

By: Silver Creek Systems Acquired by Oracle « Hub Designs Blog

Silver Creek Systems Acquired by Oracle « Hub Designs Blog — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:30:01 +0000

[...] first profiled Silver Creek in April 2009, and my first hunch that they might end up getting acquired by Oracle came with the announcement [...]

By: Dan Power

Dan Power — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:27:06 +0000

Thanks for the great comment, Martin – and for pointing out how Silver Creek’s DataLens handles the difficult scenarios that come up when dealing with product data.

By: Martin Boyd

Martin Boyd — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:08:02 +0000

Preston,

As you obviously know, inadequate information is a common problem in product data. In some cases all the information you need is right there in the record and just has to be extracted and standardized – and the DataLens System has world-leading capabilities in that regard. However in many cases the data has significat ‘holes’ in it. In this case the DataLens System has a couple of alternatives;

1) Data can be extracted from external data sources and used to enrich the target record. The DataLens System can pull data frm any external source, legacy system, subscription feed etc. Differently fotmatted/standrdized information is not a problem ans the DataLens System can extract and transform it as part of the operation.

2) If no electonic information is availbale at all, product records will be flagged as exceptions and sent ot the Governance Studio which is a dedicated interface for data stewards/product specialists to interact directly with the data and enter missing pieces of information. It is even posible to direct these exceptions to external contractors (such as India-based services that can fill-in the gaps – typically at a much lower cost than if the had to work on the whole record)

Product data is notoriously messy and even the best automation cannot create something out of nothing, however the DataLens System is built from the ground up to deal with these issues and provides a great set of efficient workarounds. No matter the approach you take, you are likely to have a much more cost-effective result than with the traditional altrenatives.

- Martin Boyd, Silver Creek Systems

By: Dan Power

Dan Power — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:57:40 +0000

Hi Preston,

With regard to Product MDM, I think there are going to be some situations where an automated engine like Silver Creek’s DataLens is going to be able to handle it, and then there will be exceptions that the engine can’t handle that will have to be routed to a data steward in the business, who may have to research the situation further and then update/correct the product master data. So if things can’t be imputed or calculated from other attributes, old fashioned human research is definitely needed.

Best regards — Dan

By: Preston

Preston — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:42:51 +0000

Dan, we spoke on the phone about a month ago. In regard specifically to product data for MDM, any comments on the ability of automated solutions such as Silver Creek’s to deal with the issue of inadequate attributes? In other words what is to be done if the existing descriptions in various fields do not contain all the information necessary for the parsing engine to populate the appropriate attribute fields? What do you see as the appropriate interplay between automated solutions such as DataLens and subject matter expertise-based manual solutions?