Hi-Definition Transformation Problems > Data Quality and Standardization

> Integrate Product Catalogs Post-acquisition

You have acquired a company with similar products and you want to integrate your catalog.

Profile

Two electronics companies merged. One of the companies was much smaller, but still on E-Business Suite, so the decision was made to load the inventory data into the larger company’s E-Business Suite instance. Both companies carried similar products, but of course the catalog numbers, descriptions, pricing, and inventory locations needed to be changed for the smaller company.

Solution

The company decided to use eprentise inventory consolidation. Before consolidating, they used eprentise software to change the system item flexfield of the smaller company. Within the eprentise temporary workspace, they loaded the items from both systems and established criteria for standardizing the data and determining duplicates across the instances. There were some times when the item appeared in the source and not in the target. Other times, the item was in the target, and not in the source. They found out that about 22% of their existing inventory were duplicate items. Adding the new inventory added about 40% duplicate items. When resolving the duplicate items, they decided to use the attributes and pricing of the target items. eprentise renumbered all the items, and changed all the relevant transactions to reflect the changed data. The company reduced their inventory value by 12% and saved an additional 10% of inventory value by standardizing on the min/max reorder points.