ServiceChannel enhances your ability to efficiently work with facilities management data through the integration with Data Direct. In this article, you will get the platform overview and learn how data is extracted. Here, you can also view the latest ServiceChannel Data Direct ERD.
Data Direct Overview
Data Direct is a data warehousing solution that allows you to get on-demand access to facilities management data. This advanced tool automatically links facilities data with other corporate data, such as real estate, sales, non-FM spend, or market research, expanding your ability to work with integrated information and analyze it. The Data Direct solution serves as a decision-support platform for enterprises that helps you to evaluate the impact of facilities on your business and vice versa.
The integration with the Data Direct platform empowers you to do the following:
- Extract specific facilities management data
- Merge R&M data from ServiceChannel with corporate data to populate company dashboards and analytics
- Investigate the relationships between facilities management and other data
- Correlate facilities management data with corporate sales information to understand store profitability relative to brand compliance, quality of service, and contractor performance
- Import facilities management data into your corporate data warehouse allowing your in-house analytics team to perform proprietary analysis
- Create your own reports using the merged data
Contact your ServiceChannel representative for more information on the integration with Data Direct.
Extracting Data via Data Direct
Major data subject areas, such as work orders and related information, invoices, assets, proposals, locations, and more, are extracted from the main ServiceChannel database and saved to a subscriber-specific target database. The latter is backed up and then made available to customers.
The following ways to extract data are available: either ServiceChannel pushes it to your target location, or you pull data from the ServiceChannel database.
Option 1: ServiceChannel Pushes Data to the Client Target Location
In this setup, ServiceChannel saves a backup file of the client-specific database. The source database is MS SQL 2019. If you need an earlier version of MS SQL Server to be supported, please contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM).
To have this setup configured, you should provide the following information to ServiceChannel:
- Client MS SQL Server version database backup that can be supported
- Location of the target destination where the file needs to be delivered
- Credentials to access the destination location
If required, please whitelist the ServiceChannel connection to allow access to your network.
Option 2: The Client Pulls Data from the ServiceChannel Database
You can pull data from Data Direct in two ways:
- Connect directly to the client-specific MS SQL database hosted in the ServiceChannel infrastructure. ServiceChannel provides you with the SQL credentials required to access the data. The connection is used to fetch data from the client-specific database to be used as the data source for the client's internal data warehouse. We recommend that you schedule data fetching to ensure that internal data processing within ServiceChannel does not conflict with the data extraction time on the client side.
- Pull the database backup from the ServiceChannel's designated SFTP location. We furnish you with the credentials needed to connect to the SFTP location.
ServiceChannel Data Direct ERD
This document contains the ServiceChannel Data Direct Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). The ERD visualizes the major entities available in the ServiceChannel data sources and the interrelations between these entities.