Thomson Financial
Thomson Financial is a $2 billion provider of information and integrated work solutions to the international financial community. They are organized into eight divisions; five focused on specific customer segments and three enterprise groups addressing broader, cross-segment customer requirements. Acquired businesses are incorporated into one of these entities.

Consistent with its growth strategy, Thomson Financial acquired Primark Disclosure, a provider of financial and business information. Primark also offers a Document-On-Demand system providing SEC filings and images of annual reports, and I/B/E/S earnings estimates on request.

The Business Benefit
Successfully migrating data after an acquisition is critical to realizing many of the acquisition's intended benefits. By leveraging CodeLab's Data Mapping and Migration tools, we insured that the Primark Disclosure assimilation happened without any impact on their data or any visibility to their customers.

At CodeLab, we understand that migrations have plenty of managerial challenges associated with them without letting the underlying technical complexity impact your business. Our job is to accelerate and smooth the data migration process for our clients. We understand the complexities associated with data migration and help our clients tackle them both efficiently and accurately. Give us a call. We can help.

The Technical Challenge
Following Thomson's acquisition of Primark, we migrated Primark Disclosure's Document-On-Demand billing and subscription data from SAP to TF's Oracle 8 billing system internally dubbed "Wildcat". Successfully migrating the Document-On-Demand system also required an FTP feed from the existing proprietary system to Wildcat.

Given that live data was extracted from the SAP system, and the Wildcat database has significant format and constraint differences from SAP, maintaining data integrity and format was critical. Codelab's "DataScrubber", programs were constructed to "scrub" and manipulate the SAP data into a format acceptable to "Wildcat" without jeopardizing data relationships. These programs then output SQL scripts to load data into Wildcat.

After successfully migrating the data, an FTP feed from the proprietary Document-On-Demand system to the SAP system was replicated, directing raw data from the existing proprietary system to Wildcat. The feed was reconstructed using a combination of technologies including but not limited to PL/SQL, UNIX commands, and stored procedures.

“Having a vendor with expertise in migration and consolidation was a tremendous help to us as we worked through the integration and migration of our systems.”

Rob Janecek, VP Thomson Financial