Developing a Data Integration Strategy is Key Factor in an Acquisitions Model’s Profitability

The Business Challenge:

Our customer has many business branches in multiple states; their strategy has been to grow through acquisition. A recent acquisition uses a different, custom built ERP system to track and report on their business.

Until our customer can fully integrate this entity’s business processes into their systems; this acquisition needs to use a combination of the legacy platform and our customers fully implemented systems. This created financial reporting complexities; merging data from the old legacy systems and the new platform were being done manually; through an inefficient short-term process.

The company needed a data integration strategy to bring the legacy platform data into a reporting data warehouse so that all the information would be readily available and exercised through existing reports.

The challenge to this was multi-faceted as the legacy platform used MySQL and the current data warehouse uses Microsoft SQL Server 2016/2017 and the custom data model used by legacy platform was entirely different.

Solution: Successful Integration of Data from Legacy Platforms

Using PowerShell, Tail Wind created scripts to download a backup of the MySQL database and restore it to local instance of MySQL daily.

We used SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and T-SQL Stored Procedures (SPROCS) to move the data from MySQL to SQL Server with the exact same schema, identify the modified/new/deleted records and transform this data into our customer’s current ERP structure.

We used SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and T-SQL SPROCS to feed the new data into the existing ETL pipeline so that the data flows into their existing warehouse; and is available for their current reporting systems, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This required some changes to the current SSRS reports and the SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) data cubes to fit the new data. We also used Microsoft Visual Studio Data Tools and TFS for code management and deployment.

Tools:

Results:

Our customer is able to access and utilize data from their legacy platforms without rebuilding their entire reporting data warehouse platform. Our solution will also save our customer time when they are ready to migrate the legacy platform into their current systems.

We can help you leverage your investment in legacy systems. Please contact us for a free consultation.