EIM Concept

EIM stands for Enterprise Integration Manager. To explain EIM in one line: it is a process that helps in importing data from other databases into Siebel database in a manner Siebel requires.
Below is the pictorial representation of Siebel EIM process. Data is first read from the legacy database tables and processed in a way suitable for Siebel. This processed data is inserted into Siebel EIM Tables appropriately and from there an EIM process is run to insert/update the Siebel base tables.

Siebel expects data in a certain way so that it makes sense to the application. 99% of the times the data available in the Legacy application is not suitable for direct insert/update into the EIM tables. For example reference Id, user keys, business logic etc. So we process them using appropriate technique like PL/SQL procedure and insert into the EIM tables. Look at the Example section to get an idea about the PL/SQL procedure and how it is loaded on EIM tables.

Now the question that might strike you is why we need EIM process to import data and why not directly insert data into Siebel base tables. Following are the reasons.

• Siebel Database is complex and EIM reduces the error and guarantees data integrity
• All base tables have a primary key column called ROW_ID and the value under this column should be a unique Siebel generated value and shouldn’t be tampered to help referential integrity.
• EIM resolves user keys which keeps referential integrity intact.
• Avoids Duplicates.
• It validates data
• Inserting or modifying data directly into the base tables violates Siebel license terms.

EIM process could be tedious but it is robust and can handle loading millions of records with guaranteed performance.
Let us get into more details about the Siebel EIM process.