Data consolidation can be enterprise-wide or departmental in scope. There are always strategic objectives for its use and many stakeholders are involved in the project. The project team includes project managers, IT professionals and functional experts. Together, the collaborative team decides jointly the business rules for data consolidation. These rules address issues such as:

• How many years of data must be consolidated?
• What filters and other transformations must be applied to the input data sources?
• How the various sources of input data should be mapped to the new data?
• How to supply the missing fields if the new system requires more fields that are not available in the input data source?

For a successful completion of data consolidation project, it is important that all the team members stay current with the business rules. xFusion Studio uses a document-centric model to facilitate sharing of information. All the business rules can be logically grouped into one or more documents called Fusion packs. Team members can simply exchange Fusion packs much like exchanging Excel or Word documents. You can also use any standard document control system to keep track of changes.

Furthermore, each business rule can be annotated within xFusion Studio. This helps team members understand the motivation behind each business rule and can also look at the history of changes.

Data Acquisition Stage

xFusion Studio has native connectivity for most common databases, applications and ISAM files. xFusion Studio also supports connectivity through OLEDB and ODBC, enabling data acquisition from virtually thousands of proprietary data sources.

Data Quality and Cleansing Stage

For older systems the data quality tends to decrease over time. Employees may be linked to non-existing departments. Some products may be obsolete. Addresses may be incomplete. A consolidation project is a perfect opportunity to clean the data before moving it into the new system. xFusion Studio uses state of the art technologies for data profiling and data cleansing. Besides standard data cleansing efforts such as removing obsolete products and customers, xFusion Studio can help identify data inconsistencies, remove duplicates, and in general make data more valuable.

Data Mapping Stage

One reason data consolidation projects tend to get complex is because there is not always a simple mapping between the older systems and the new system. There may be fields in the older system that have no equivalent in the new system. There may be  fields in the new system that are not available in the older system. Finally, the data formats may be different between the old fields and the new fields.

xFusion Studio provides a powerful query object model:

• xFusion Studio provides a number of ways to define data mappings and lookups
• xFusion Studio provides powerful out-of-the-box transformation functions to help you convert the older fields into the desired format

Post-consolidation Accuracy Checks

xFusion Studio facilitates developing post consolidation quality checks in a collaborative environment. For example, the older data can be compared with the data in the new system and a summary of changes can be exported to Excel.