Data from three companies – how do you integrate?

How do you integrate data from three companies following a three-way merger? One of our long term clients was recently acquired by a rival company. They also bought another company at the same time. This lead to some serious integration decisions! Decisions that had to be made by the new parent. How to merge the data from three different companies? The three companies were all operating in the same domain. Hence all had the same business problems to solve. One area that AlphaLogix was able to help was integrating the various CRMs, in-house applications, and Accounting information. A decision was made to keep one of the CRMs and build on top of that. This needed a comprehensive data migration plan. The final solution was built on Infor CRM. This CRM was already in use at one of the merged companies.

The day to day operations of the business needed addressing. While at the same time work went on to get the various sources clean and ready to merge. As the business is built on transport, with mobile workers, there was work needed to streamline the old systems. Fortunately the companies all used the same mobile devices. This fact reduced the complexity of the final solution. Our brief from the new Manager was to replace the three in-house apps with one simple end user solution. The routing solution was built on our AlphaMobile product. The solution included Infor CRM, a server, and mobile PDAs. There is a route planning operation that routes jobs to drivers. The jobs for drivers are driven by Infor CRM Tickets.

The terrific news is that the data has all been migrated. The new routing solution is up and running. The three companies are now operating as one. This is thanks to some serious discussions to thrash out the various issues. Followed by some meticulous planning and execution.

The data migration process:

• Identify data that MUST be migrated to Infor CRM.
• Prioritise functionality to be migrated to Infor CRM.
• Investigate and fix Data Quality issues prior to migration. (Such as: de-duplication, bad data).
• Identify and document metadata. (Undertake field to field mapping, data types, and content conversion. Then document).
• Identify and document stringent and re-runnable unit tests. (For migrated data prior to execution).
• Create a staging database to hold data in transition prior to transformation and a second fix pass. (Postcode/address checking, further de-duplication. Produce exception reports for manual verification).

Do you have any company migration issues to resolve? Big or small, AlphaLogix are here to help. It is what we do well. For further advice contact us at info@alphalogix.co.uk. Or call us on 0845 259 3141.