EDI/Data Integration Expert Interview Questions And Answers

Data profiling is the process of assessing and understanding the content, quality, and structure of enterprise data. It is an essential step in reconciling semantic differences in common business vocabulary such as customer, address, and product that varies among applications, and which, if unaddressed, results in contradictory information across the enterprise.

Following are the benefits of data integration:

☛ Makes reporting, monitoring, placing customer information across the enterprise flexible and
☛ convenient.
☛ Data usage is efficient.
☛ Cost Effective.
☛ Risk adjusted profitability management as it allows accurate data extraction.
☛ Allows timely and reliable reporting, as data quality is the prime technology for business challenges.

Once data is profiled, an EDI platform can execute data cleansing functions to ensure the validity and consistency of information. It standardizes name, address, and other values, and resolves missing data fields, parses data elements, and corrects poorly formatted or conflicting data.

The process of combining data from different resources.
The combined data is provided to the users with unified view.
Information from different enterprise domains are integrated - known as Enterprise Information Integration.
Useful for merging information from different technologies among enterprises.
The sub areas of data integration are

☛ Data Warehousing.
☛ Data Migration.
☛ Master Data Management.

Data transformation services enable data to be transformed from one form to another to allow reconciliation between data elements residing in different information sources. The transformation services leverage pre-built and customized mappings that take into account complex data hierarchies and relationships.

☛ What is the difference between Query transform and SQl transform in BODI?
☛ What is the difference between lookup(0 and lookup_ext() functions in BODI?
☛ How we will implement Full outer join in BODI?Explain with some examples?
☛ What is the difference between parallel processing projects and grid processing projects?
☛ What is Cascade and Drill Through? What is the difference between them?
☛ How do you import tables from source metadata?
☛ What is DI Hierarchy, What are the reusable objects?

EDI offers flexible mechanisms for "right-time" data delivery in an SOA, including high-volume bulk data movement, near-real time capabilities, data federation, and changed data capture that handles only information that has been updated to accelerate load times and minimize operational impact.

☛ What is EDI?
☛ What are the things which makes EDI solutions differ from standard XML solutions?
☛ How to create EDI schema?
☛ What is the default character set supported by EDI pipeline?
☛ How does BizTalk resolves Agreement?
☛ When does fallback agreement properties come into picture?
☛ It is required to use EDI Pipeline in the EDI solution, but I can't see in the options?
☛ What are the values which Segment Separtor Suffix and Segment Terminator Suffix can have?
☛ Is there a realtion between EDI send pipeline and Parties?
☛ What are the options to release EDI Batch message to destination?
☛ Is it possible to receive Multiple Interchanges in a Single Message and parse it?
☛ Can we access EDI message context properties in orchestration?

EDI provides in-depth lineage of data - when it was changed, how, by whom, and across which applications - to enable auditing, reporting, and analysis essential to meeting the demands of legislated regulations and internal/external auditors.

The different types of the source system in SAP includes

☛ SAP R/3 source system
☛ SAP BW
☛ Flat files
☛ External Systems

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning Software and is a integrated computer based system used to manage a company's resources effectively. It ensures smooth information amongst various departments in an enterprise or a company and manages workflows.

While executing the SAP Payment Run the standard stages of SAP includes

☛ Entering of parameters: It includes entering company codes, vendor accounts, payment methods, etc.
☛ Proposal Scheduling: The system proposes list of invoices to be paid
☛ Payment booking: Booking of the actual payments into the ledger
☛ Printing of Payment forms: Printing of payment forms

☛ SAP
☛ Baan
☛ JD Edwards (now acquired by Oracle)
☛ Siebel
☛ Peoplesoft (now acquired by Oracle)
☛ Microsoft Dynamics

☛ ALE: Application Linking enabling
☛ IDOC: Intermediatary documents
☛ EDI: Electronic data interchange
☛ RFC: Remote function call

SAP stands for Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing. It was Founded in 1972 by Wellenreuther, Hopp, Hector, Plattner and Tschira and is a German Company.

SAP is name of the company as well its ERP product.

SAP is #1 in the ERP market. As of 2010, SAP has more than 140,000 installations worldwide, over 25 industry-specific business solutions, and more than 75,000 customers in 120 countries.

Bex means Business Explorer. It allows end user to locate reports, analyze information, view reports and can execute queries. The queries in workbook can be saved to their respective roles in the Bex browser. It has following components Bex analyzer, Bex Map and Bex web.

SAP R/3 - It succeds SAP R/2 and is market leader in ERP. R/3 stands for three tier architecture i.e. Presentation , Logic and Data tier. It has many modules like SD , FI , HR etc which encompass almost all enterprise departments.

mySAP - It is a suite of SAP products which apart from SAP R/3 also includes SRM , PLM, CRM, SCM

AWB stands for Administrator Workbench. It is a tool for monitoring, controlling and maintaining all the processes connected with data staging and processing in the business information warehousing.

Netweaver is an integrated technology platform such that all the products in the mySAP suite can run on a single instance of netweaver known as SAP Web Application Server (SAP WEBAs).

The advantage of using Netweaver is you can access SAP data using the web (http protocol) or even mobile. Thus you can save on costs involved in training users on SAP Client side GUI.

To create a table in the data dictionary, you have to follow this steps

☛ Creating domains (data type, field length, range)
☛ Creating data elements (Properties and type for a table field)
☛ Creating tables (SE 11)

☛ FI (Financial Accounting)
☛ CO(Controlling)
☛ EC(Enterprise Controlling)
☛ TR(Treasury)
☛ IM (Investment Management)
☛ HR (Human Resource)
☛ SD (Sales and Distribution)
☛ MM (Materials Management)
☛ PM (Plant Maintenance)
☛ PP (Production Planning)
☛ QM - Quality Management
☛ BW (Business Warehousing)

There are many industry specific solutions that SAP provides apart from the list of modules above which is ever growing.

Different layers in R/3 system includes

Presentation Layer
Database layer
Application layer

Meta Data: Meta Data is data about Data. It tells you about the structure of data or MetaObjects.

Master Data: This Data is key business information like Customer information , Employee , Materials etc. This is more like a reference data. For Ex. If a customer orders 10 units of your product instead of asking customer for his shipping address 10 times , the same can be referenced from the Customer Master Data.

Transaction Data: This is data related to day to day transactions.

Variables are used in different application

☛ Characteristics variable
☛ Hierarchies
☛ Hierarchy nodes
☛ Text
☛ Formulas
☛ Processing Types
☛ Replacement Path
☛ User entry/default type

Three stages of data-mining includes

☛ Initial Exploration
☛ Model building
☛ Deployment