Multiple ERPs

[Tmk123]

Hello, 

I recently started with a company and I have learned they have multiple ERPs, as a result of business acquisitions.  These companies deal with the same vendors in a lot of cases and as a result, have some duplicate and similar item numbers.  I have been tasked with building dashboards that highlight vendor spend, purchase order details, inventory levels, etc...  These dashboards need to show the individual locations and aggregate into divisional metrics.

I am new to Power BI.  My goal is to follow best practices and utilize a star schema in my model so that I can drill down without any issues.

Are there any resources out there that describe what to do when you have five items master tables, five Purchase Order tables, etc...  I am looking for some general advice from the community, resources to read, or videos to watch to get me started.  I feel like it's important to put all of my effort into setting up the model correctly.  Again, keep in mind that in terms of the item master, there are many duplicate item numbers between each ERP.

Thanks all!!  You have all been so helpful.

[parry2k]

@Tmk123 Great question and glad your focus is on developing a strong model, which is a rare thought process for many BI solution developers. Good job!

To answer your question, you surely need to combine all the tables together to keep it one, Let's all purchase order tables are combined as one single PO table, maybe you want to add a company/ERP tag to it so that you can filter on specific company/ERP if you need to.

Now comes to the master/dimension table: you need to still combine the Product/Item table but need to remove the duplicate rows so that these are unique and can have a one to many relationship with the fact tables.

I hope this will give you an idea but feel free to reach out if you have more questions. It is always never easy to answer everything on a topic like this. You are on the right path with the right thinking. Good luck!