5 Companies Unified into One ERP & CRM

A regional industrial distributor acquired five companies in 18 months and inherited six incompatible ERP systems, no common identifiers, and over 180,000 records of conflicting data. We consolidated everything into a single unified ERP and CRM with clean, deduplicated master data.

The Challenge

Five acquisitions in 18 months meant six different ERP systems (including one legacy platform from the 1990s), no common customer or item identifiers, conflicting vendor records, and years of transaction history scattered across incompatible databases.

The same customer might appear in three systems under three different account numbers with three different name spellings. The same product from the same manufacturer might carry five different internal SKUs. Vendor payment terms varied by company for identical suppliers.

The parent company had selected their target ERP and CRM platforms. What they needed was someone to make sense of the data chaos and get everything consolidated cleanly without losing the institutional knowledge embedded in the legacy systems.

The Solution

Customer Master Consolidation

We built a multi-stage matching and deduplication process: exact matching on name/address/phone, fuzzy algorithmic matching for variations (e.g., "ABC Manufacturing" vs "ABC Mfg Inc"), USPS address normalization, and a manual review queue for edge cases where staff from acquired companies made judgment calls.

Result: 34% of all customer records were duplicates that would have caused split purchase history, double marketing contacts, and inflated reporting.

Item Catalog Unification

We worked with operations to establish a unified part numbering scheme using manufacturer part numbers as the linking key. Category structures and product attributes were standardized. Comprehensive cross-reference tables ensured legacy part numbers still worked.

Result: combined catalog reduced from 95,000+ SKUs to ~62,000 unique products (a 35% reduction), with full cross-references for historical lookups.

Vendor Consolidation

Vendor deduplication included a terms review process where purchasing staff compared terms across acquired companies and selected the optimal setup. In several cases, combined purchasing volume qualified for better pricing than any individual company had.

Historical Data Migration

Transaction history (orders, invoices, payments, shipments) was extracted from each source system, mapped to consolidated master records, and loaded into the target ERP. A customer's complete purchase history now appears in one place regardless of which legacy company they bought from.

Implementation

Months 1-2: Discovery and mapping across all six source systems. Built matching tools and established deduplication rules.

Months 3-4: Customer and vendor consolidation. Unified master records created in target systems.

Month 5: Item catalog migration with all cross-references.

Month 6: Historical transaction data migration. Supported operational cutover as each acquired company transitioned.

The Results