5 Databases into One Does Go!

Anyone who is buying goods and services for their company knows the importance of tracking market prices.  Some markets like currencies are simple but others are not.  A well known consumer products company, based in New York, wanted to track the price of plastic resins which are a key ingredient in the manufacture of plastic packaging. 

Unfortunately for them, there is no single source of data that provides prices for the 8 main types of resins, the key grades within each type and for all the major industrialised countries of the world.  They asked MSC DataMan to produce a single database that would combine all the various sources of data.

131 Price Series From 5 Sources...

After researching the marketplace, we discovered that they needed prices from 131 different time series.  We also identified that the sources of this data could be grouped into 5 distinct time periods or eras as follows: 

• Era 1 (1984 to Today) Monthly USA prices for 4 resin types from source A
• Era 2 (1992 to Today) Weekly USA prices for 4 resin types from source B
• Era 3 (1997 to Today) Weekly USA prices for 6 resin types from source B with prices available for key grades within each type.
• Era 4 (2002 to Today) Weekly prices for 8 resin types from source C for countries within Asia/Pacific, Europe & USA and from source D for countries within Latin America.

• Era 5 (2003 to Today) Monthly prices for up to 6 resin types from local suppliers in Asia and Europe

...Into One Simple to Use Database...

Since we fully understood that this data had to be available to the buyers in an easy to use format whilst being simple to update, MSC DataMan developed a combined system.  This used Microsoft Access to store the data and Microsoft Excel to present all 131 price series in a single pivot table that made it so simple for any buyer to track any of these series or a group of them together.  Updating the database was made easy as well with data from 3 of the sources being updated automatically with macros and the other 2 requiring a simple copy and paste from a website. 

..That Survived the Credit Crunch!

The strength of this system was demonstrated in 2008 when one of the data sources went bankrupt.  The client was able to integrate the data from a replacement source without any further input from MSC DataMan.