Our Client
Our client, a Fortune 500 leader in oil and gas, was in negotiations with a competitor over a potential acquisition and merger. Before the merger could go through, the client's financial data needed to be mapped to the acquiring company's metadata structure.
Environment
- Financial data across 80+ countries
- 50,000+ employees
CloudADDIE was chosen for this project on the strength of our earlier work with the client and our familiarity with the complexity of their data.
The Challenges
- Map the client's financial data to the acquiring company's metadata structure.
- Clean up the client's data so the one to one mapping would be accurate.
Because each company's data structure was designed differently, the one to one mapping would be highly complex. Sorting out data quality before any mapping began was essential to the accuracy of all future integrated reporting, and ultimately to the success of the project.
Solutions
CloudADDIE's prior knowledge of the client's data, along with a closer review during due diligence, helped the team spot issues that originated in the SAP source system. Billing documents, for instance, were coded to the wrong product line, and product lines were not defined separately on invoices, so there was no reliable way to tell which products had actually been sold.
Software solutions used in this project include:
We advised the client that the data in SAP needed cleaning up. The team began extracting data from an Oracle database and building a new Essbase database, migrating a total of 185 fields. Going through the dataset, they found multiple columns with blank data or duplicate members, along with fields that had been imported from other sources and had nothing to do with the mapping project. Those fields were removed. Working closely with the client's stakeholders throughout, the team scrubbed the data and identified the right fields to map to the acquiring company.
Results
The project finished on time and within budget. In under four weeks the data was scrubbed, narrowing the dataset from 185 fields to 95. With the data clean, CloudADDIE moved forward with the full integration of the financial data and recreated the forecasting and profitability cost management allocation processes to match the acquiring company's models.
Testimonial
"An organization of our size depends heavily on the talent and deep technical knowledge of subject matter experts and consultants. Often, that means dedicating a significant part of the day to extensive status updates, a practice which can be costly to our company while also tying up important resources in redundant meetings of little value. I have an appreciation for CloudADDIE and their approach to this problem. They simply become part of our team, and our ongoing, daily interaction with them eliminates the need for formal meetings. This helps keep us all on track with our timelines and budgets."