How TimeXtender Simplifies Exchange Rates for Global Organizations

A company doing business in multiple countries that wants to enrich its analytics data with currency exchange rates data might not know where to begin. For instance, they might ask themselves:

• Where do I get exchange-rate data?
• How do I integrate that data with existing pipelines?
• How do we set up a “chron job” or a scheduled refresh?
• Which tools do we use to connect to data?
• Where do we store the data?
• How do we visualize?
• How do we document the data pipeline and storage?

That’s a lot to contemplate. Fortunately, we have considered these questions for organizations selling goods and services on a global basis and needing to deal with exchange rates. TimeXtender solves this process very easily. Here’s how:

Using TimeXtender’s Operational Data Exchange (ODX) users can easily connect to more than 200 web applications and data sources without leaving the platform, connect the ODX to a RESTful API and store the data in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS). This allows you to store your information in a single format and central location, laying the foundation for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). You can seamlessly link to a web service so that you can pull in daily global exchange rates into your computing platform. You’re then empowered to transform this newly stored data for the metrics for specific business requests. In addition, you can schedule the data refresh for the raw data source (RESTful API) in just a few simple clicks. One other point, TimeXtender supports both on-premises and Azure cloud implementations. Also, migrating an on-premises solution to the cloud can be done very easily using TimeXtender and in very little time.

Admittedly, this could all be done with many different, disparate tools, but it takes so much longer to get the same results MINUS the easy maintenance that TimeXtender provides. Even more, you would be lacking in documentation, an easy way to modify models and pipelines, and, you would need the skill set to work with each of the different systems.

From the ODX, you can build the Modern Data Warehouse (MDW). Here, users can integrate their data into their purchasing model and store it in the MDW while cleansing, transforming, consolidating and governing this complex data. With the MDW, data quality issues can be resolved one time. Similar data from different systems can be rationalized to create golden records to establish a “single version of the truth,” and to preserve historical data as data and source systems change over time.

Users can search within the data lake and drag and drop tables into their data warehouse. This brings their value field into the purchasing table and allows them to define currency codes for each country, and edit their formula for converting these values to the intended country.

With TimeXtender’s semantic model, you can smoothly create measures, add changes and transform your data from the MDW allowing you to publish to Power BI, Tableau or Qlik dashboards from the same model. You are also able to maintain documentation and changes about your data that is visualized.

Bottom line, TimeXtender is designed for rapid and simplified building, deployment, management and maintenance, and as your business grows and requires easier ways to manage your data -- such as accounting for exchange rates – TimeXtender delivers. To watch how to deal with exchange rates using TimeXtender, check out our TimeXtender demo.