Case Study · Post-Merger Systems Recovery

Contract Data Pipeline

A two-million-dollar, two-year integration between two acquired companies never worked. I delivered a working unified model in under five months, and left the team able to run it without me.

Details are generalized; sensitive identifiers and client specifics are redacted.

2 yrs
Prior attempt, failed
<5 mo
To a working baseline
$2M
Spent on the failed attempt
1
Single source of truth
The problem

Two years and two million dollars produced two systems that still didn't recognize each other.

A merger integration that never actually merged anything
  • Two acquired companies had spent two years and two million dollars trying to integrate their systems. It never worked.
  • The two systems were unrecognizable to each other: different starting points (customer vs. account), different workflows, operating in complete conflict rather than in parallel.
  • Historical data had been scrapped along the way. Revenue and marketing couldn't trust the numbers they were looking at.
  • Everything was half-done. Nothing was complete, and nobody could say with confidence what state the data was actually in.
The approach

Not a rebuild from zero. A focused fix on what was actually broken.

Fix what's broken, not everything
  • I left most of what the two-year effort had touched alone and went after what was actually broken and fixable in the near term.
  • Aligned the product model as the single source of truth both systems could reconcile against, rather than trying to force one legacy structure onto the other.
A working baseline, not another two-year plan
  • Delivered a working baseline in less than five months that unified live, active contract and product data, far faster than the previous two-year, two-million-dollar attempt.
  • Delivered something the previous effort never did: a team that actually understood the system underneath it.
  • Post-merger data unification
  • Single source of truth
  • Product model alignment
  • Contract data governance
The results

Five months beat two years, and the bigger win wasn't even the speed.

A working model, and a team that understands it
  • Went from a failed two-million-dollar, two-year integration to a working, unified contract and product model in five months.
  • More importantly, the business operations team went from confused to empowered. They'd been suffering in silence with a system they didn't understand; now they do.
  • Revenue and marketing regained a number they could actually trust, which is the entire point of a single source of truth.
“Delivering your vision that your team can actually own.”
What the team owns now

I didn't just hand off a system. I leveled up the people who run it.

Understanding they didn't have before
  • I taught the business operations team how the products actually work, how the data flows, and how to make decisions based on that understanding, not on guesses about a system they'd inherited.
  • They own the data model outright. Nobody has to call me when something looks wrong, because they can see for themselves why it's happening.
The next frontier, on their terms
  • They took ownership of the next phase themselves: evaluating and implementing a proper CPQ system on top of the working foundation I left them.
  • The system was never really the deliverable. A team that can decide where it goes next without me in the room is.
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