Novartis, a Fortune 100 maker and distributor of pharmaceutical and consumer products, needed a solution to receive, validate, and transform forecast and actual sales data received from a number of retailers. These include some of the largest chains in the country such as Walmart, Target, CVS, RiteAid, and others. This data is then used to drive management reporting and is also fed into a data warehouse. Data from retailers is usually received as Excel spreadsheets. Format, content, and quality of data varied considerably between various partners. Some reported forecast and actual side-by-side while others reported them in different sheets. Some data files were organized by products while others by territories. In many instances, data was reported by periods (months, weeks, days) at the top of the sheets.
Novartis needed a software product that provided the power and functionality to deal with a multitude of data formats while featuring a high degree of usability. The product must also provide very strong data transformation and pivoting/unpivoting capabilities to transpose periodic data into a normalized format suitable for analytics and reporting engines. Powerful string and date manipulation capabilities were also needed to deal with various date formats and period frequencies.
After reviewing several products in the market, Novartis selected Centerprise Data Integrator. The key reason for choosing Centerprise was powerful data transformation feature especially pivot and unpivot mapping and ability to deal with data of varying quality.
Centerprise Data Integrator is used to convert sales and forecast data from retailers. The product is able to handle all the idiosyncrasies of data from retailers. Data quality rules are used to identify and correct any inconsistencies.