Forum Discussion
Consolidating data from different sources
Thanks for the response. So the current monthly sales report comes from a different system and although I can pull multiple months I run additional analysis within the master document to show customer trends, month by month analysis etc. Importing just the most recent months data seemed the easiest way to increment the data without having to double check a whole load of the analytics formulae we use.
The customer contact data is really to be used so we can run campaigns based on the results. So for example, if I can see a customer purchases every 3 months, I can run a campaign to target them in 2 months time.
At the moment I would have to export the customerID list, then do a consolidate with dataset1 and then run a mailmerge (for example) of the results. If I can merge the datasets I just reduce about 5 steps in my current process.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul_icapture_appit makes sense to a certain extent. I hope you can run with Sergei's suggestion.
My point on keeping the customer contact info in its own separate file is that you can always combine that single record with multiple records or with the analysis of those multiple months worth of sales, and do so in a mail merge. It gets complicated, but mail merge (in Word, I presume) can do quite a bit like that (although it's been literally decades since I did so myself)... You can do your analysis of a given customer's ordering patterns in the sales database, and just merge in the contact info at time of contact. Because customer ID is part of the sales record, you don't need to redundantly have it in every row of the customer sales activity table.