Unit4 launches Data Hub, faster real-time insights without manual data integration

New extraction layer eliminates complex and costly data connection management for customers

Unit4, a leading provider of cloud-based business solutions for people-centric businesses, today launches Data Hub, a managed extraction warehouse for large data volumes, built into Unit4 ERPx. The service eliminates the complexity of data extraction and managing connections between analytics tools and business systems, enabling organizations to access real-time insights and act faster in an increasingly competitive environment.

Data Hub delivers data in finance, projects and HR directly to Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, BigQuery and all platforms that support the open Delta Sharing protocol. With no API call caps, speed limits, file transfers, or manual refresh jobs, organizations can more easily access up-to-date data. Data Hub is maintained in conjunction with each Unit4 ERPx release, and data connections remain intact through platform updates, eliminating the need for costly rework. This reduces hidden maintenance costs and allows analytics and BI teams to focus on delivering insights instead of managing integrations.

Data Hub solves two key limitations in traditional business data analytics, which typically require IT teams to manually schedule data exports before the information is reformatted and loaded into tools for Business Intelligence (BI). If problems arise during export, reports will be incorrect. If the schema changes, the data flow will be broken. The alternative is to extract data via API, which is subject to speed limitations, pagination, and data size limitations. As data sets become increasingly complex, such as general ledger tables, extractions become more difficult to perform reliably and require ongoing maintenance every time the schema changes.

– In the age of automation, an organization's data is its competitive advantage, says Jennifer Sherman, Chief Product Officer at Unit4.

– Unit4 is proud to help our customers get more value from their knowledge, data and insights. Data Hub makes data connection extraction and management a breeze. Unit4 challenge, not you, so you can spend your time on what really matters to your organization.

This approach ensures:

• Scalable access without API limitations: Developed for large-scale analytics needs instead of transaction-by-transaction API calls.
• Focus on analysis, not export menus: Data and analytics teams get controlled access to data in Unit4 ERPx via the platforms they already use. No need to contact IT or wait for manual extracts.
• Data is automatically kept up to date: Automatic updates occur daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your subscription, rather than maintaining scheduled export jobs. Incremental loading is also used, meaning only changed records are transferred, not full data extracts.
• Works even after platform updates: Schema versioning in Data Hub is maintained by Unit4 with each release of Unit4 ERPx, ensuring that data connections are designed to work even after platform updates. No fallbacks or silent failures.
• ERP performance is not affected: Analytical workloads run on a separate data store, independent of Unit4 ERPx transaction processing, ensuring that heavy analytics do not impact the performance of operational users.
• Works with both current and future technology environments: Because Data Hub is built on Delta Sharing, the data connection does not need to be rebuilt even if a customer switches from Power BI to Microsoft Fabric or from Snowflake to BigQuery.

“Data Hub was easy to set up and gave us the tools to feed data into our reporting models,” says Chris Dixon, Finance Systems Manager at Butlins.

– It improved our productivity because we no longer had to download data from the system to Excel to manually enter it into our reporting models. All the report objects we need to report against are available in the tool.

There are multiple potential uses for Data Hub, including large-scale enterprise analytics and business intelligence, as the service provides scheduled access at scale without API limitations, keeping the data warehouse up-to-date and BI dashboards reflecting the current state of the business.

Finance teams in multi-unit organizations can use Data Hub to analyze and consolidate historical general ledger data for management reporting. The solution enables the connection of outcomes, cost center budgets, and variance data directly to a BI platform for ongoing monitoring rather than just historical analysis.

Data Hub also enables faster implementation and less complexity in daily operations than API-based ETL methods for organizations that need scheduled access to large volumes of ERP data for analysis. Because the solution is based on Delta Sharing, lock-in to a single analytics provider is avoided while reducing the complexity of ETL processes.

The technology can also be used by data and AI teams that need large amounts of historical ERP data for model training and experimentation, while maintaining the performance of Unit4 ERPx regardless of the application.