When you’re growing by acquisition, and each company you buy uses a different financial software platform, you need to get creative.

At Domtar Corp.’s Personal Care division, that meant leaving transactional systems in place and using a cloud-based data warehouse as an integration point. A spate of five acquisitions over a three-year period between 2011 and 2014 gave the company the scale it needed in a promising new line of business, but it also presented integration challenges.

“We’ve got, SAP, Microsoft/Great Plains, legacy PeopleSoft and several different versions of Oracle,” said Alisha Witty (@Alisha_Witty, left), chief data architect for Domtar Personal Care, who joined the company in 2013 from business intelligence (BI) vendor MicroStrategy Inc. When integration planning began in late 2013, “We knew we weren’t going to stop the acquisitions soon, and we didn’t have the staff to accommodate everything. Our CIO said we’ve got to move to the cloud.”

Time was of the essence. Parent company Domtar Corp. is the largest integrated producer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America, and the second largest in the world, but paper hasn’t been exactly a growth industry in the age of PDFs and email. The company saw opportunity in personal care products, particularly those used for adult incontinence, and made the decision to grow its market footprint quickly through acquisition. Today, Domtar Personal Care products are in more than 50 countries. Its best-known brand is Attends.

Practical thinking

Integrating disparate financial systems is a massive undertaking, and Domtar management figured that wholesale consolidation would be an expensive luxury. What managers really needed was consolidated reporting. Enter the data warehouse.

SQL Server was selected as the data warehouse and MicroStrategy BI as the front end. Witty designed the data warehouse and the integration model for the financial data. Following a six-month selection process, Domtar chose cloud hosting and analytics vendor Pandera Systems LLC to handle the integration with multiple cloud vendors and to implement the warehouse.

Pandera took charge of harmonizing diverse data structures and loading them into the database. “We didn’t touch transactional systems,” other than to extract production data, Witty said. Because Domtar Personal Care is so geographically diverse, the company needed multiple clouds to serve different regions and to comply with local regulations. Pandera handled that, too.

The appeal of cloud was fast scalability and cost efficiency, Witty said. “Yes, we could have gone out and bought the hardware, but we went with cloud because we didn’t want to be in the data center business,” she remembered. Just four months after choosing Pandera, Domtar Personal Care’s cloud warehouse was in business.

Many regions, one view

Managers across eight different geographical regions can now use a MicroStrategy dashboard to see consolidated results from all Domtar Personal Care businesses in a single chart (see above). Each acquired business still has its own ERP system; the enterprise data warehouse is the integration point.

Pandera is the go-between, and “we’ve not had any issues,” Witty said. The hosting provider quickly resolved the only outage that has occurred over the past two years, and there was no impact on the business.  “We’ve had near-perfect uptime, everything is backed up, we get weekly reports on updates and patches,” Witty said, “and it’s easy.”

Now that the company has successfully integrated a half-dozen ERP systems, it’s ready for more. “We’ve done this five times, so we know how to connect to the source quickly,” Witty said. Instead of spinning up instances and configuring networks, “we can focus on integration, analytics and adding value to the business.”

Image courtesy Domtar Personal Care