Catella Consolidated Four Decades of CRM Fragmentation into One Salesforce Platform with conemis

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Every acquisition brings a new system. Every system brings its own data model, its own object logic, and its own definition of what a client record looks like. By the time an organization decides to consolidate, the problem has usually been compounding for years, and the project scope is significantly larger than anyone originally anticipated.

Forty years of growth left Catella with a CRM problem that no one had designed, and everyone had inherited. The pan-European investment management firm, listed on NASDAQ with 16 billion euros in assets under management across 12 countries, arrived at its Salesforce consolidation carrying 8 separate CRM systems, 300TB+ of data in 9 languages, and 15 distinct business processes that had never shared a common data model.  

Catella selected conemis transition cloud (ctc) to consolidate all of it into one Salesforce platform. The consolidation delivered a 70% reduction in migration cost and completed 30% ahead of schedule with 0 errors at go-live. This article covers what the migration required, how ctc delivered it, and what the outcome tells enterprise organizations facing similar complexity about the real cost of fragmented CRM data.

Why M&A-Driven CRM Fragmentation Is Underestimated

The standard approach to post-acquisition CRM integration is to delay it. The acquisition closes, the target business continues operating on its existing systems, and the consolidation is scheduled for a future program. Over multiple acquisitions, it creates a landscape that is increasingly difficult to rationalize.

The operational cost is not always visible as a single line item. It shows up in client-facing teams that cannot share data across markets, in reporting that requires manual reconciliation across systems, and in technology investments that cannot be fully leveraged because the underlying data is fragmented and inconsistent.  

The Four Risks That Derail Multi-System CRM Consolidations

When consolidation is finally initiated at this scale, the technical complexity is rarely scoped accurately upfront. The risks that surface most often are:

• Migration scope expands faster than planned. Every source system requires custom mapping rules before data can move. Across multiple systems and processes, that upfront analysis alone consumes a significant share of the project budget.  

• Running two Salesforce orgs simultaneously creates compounding risk. Without a structured consolidation, record ownership, relationship history, and reporting accuracy degrade in ways that become visible only after go-live.  

• Inconsistent data quality across systems delays every downstream decision. Duplicate entries, incomplete fields, and conflicting client profiles require resolution before the new platform can deliver a reliable view of the business.  

• Manual execution does not scale. Without a repeatable migration framework, each phase of the project rebuilds what the previous one established. Timelines extend, costs compound, and the window of business risk stays open longer than it should.

The Scope of Catella's Multi-System Legacy Consolidation

Each of the 8 source systems carried its own data model, object structure, and relationship logic. Before any production run could begin, the team needed to complete a full analysis across all sources. At Catella's scale, that meant:

• Replace 8 fragmented CRM systems with a single, unified Salesforce platform serving all 12 European markets

• Consolidate 300TB+ of structured and unstructured data across 9 languages and 15 business processes without data loss or quality degradation

• Maintain uninterrupted business operations throughout the transition.

• Reduce cost and timeline relative to the original estimate without compromising data integrity or compliance

The final goal is where tooling selection has the greatest leverage. Manual migration approaches, built on spreadsheet-based transformation logic and sequential system-by-system processing, cannot compress timelines at this scope.  

From Eight Source Systems to One Salesforce Destination

ctc automated the end-to-end extraction, transformation, and loading process across all eight source systems, replacing manual workflows with structured, system-level mapping into Salesforce. Legacy data models were translated directly, with relationship fields resolved programmatically. Record ID rewriting, one-to-many object mappings, and complex transformation logic were executed within the platform, eliminating reliance on spreadsheets and reducing risk at scale.

Centralized control provided full visibility and governance throughout the migration. Iterative testing and validation cycles were conducted ahead of each production run to ensure data accuracy before go-live. The framework was inherently repeatable with each cycle refining the last, enabling continuous improvement without resetting the effort. This repeatability compressed the overall timeline and allowed the project to progress more efficiently despite its scale.

Singh's reference to scalability reflects a design principle that runs through ctc: the platform absorbs complexity rather than passing it to the project team as a configuration burden. Catella's first migration is already informing plans for a broader Enterprise Data program. The same framework that handled 8 CRM systems across 12 countries is extensible to any source system with a connectable API or file-based export.

70% Lower Cost, 30% Faster, and Zero Errors at Go-Live

The project closed with 0 errors and 100% data accountability from first run to go-live. Against the original plan:

• Migration cost reduced by 70%

• Time to market accelerated by 30%

• All 8 source systems consolidated into a single Salesforce platform

• Client records consistent across all 12 European countries from day one

• 0 errors at go-live with 100% data accountability across every migration run

Every Catella team now operates from one platform. The two independent Salesforce instances are now unified. Data quality is governed centrally. The institutional knowledge carried across all 8 source systems arrived in Salesforce intact, correctly structured, and immediately usable.

For any enterprise organization managing a fragmented CRM landscape inherited through M&A, those numbers establish a concrete benchmark. A consolidation of this scope, at this cost, on this timeline, with zero errors, is what the right migration platform makes possible. Read the full Catella success story.

What Catella's M&A Consolidation Means for Organizations Facing Similar Complexity

M&A-driven CRM fragmentation is not a client-specific problem. It is a structural consequence of how European mid-market and enterprise businesses grow. Every acquisition adds a system. Every system adds a data model. Over time, the gap between what a unified platform could deliver and what the actual landscape allows becomes a measurable drag on operational efficiency, client visibility, and technology investment.

Salesforce's AI capabilities, across Agentforce and Einstein, operate on the data that lives in the org. A fragmented, inconsistent data landscape is not AI-ready. The value that AI can deliver is directly proportional to the quality and completeness of the underlying records. Organizations that defer CRM consolidation are also deferring meaningful access to AI capabilities, regardless of what platform licenses they hold.

“It was a pleasure collaborating with experts like Abhinandan Singh on this migration, professionals who truly understand the importance of automation and structured methodology in complex projects. The successful Catella migration, with high customer satisfaction, is a strong testament to this and makes me proud of our product and SME teams..”

-Omid Afaghi, Managing Director of conemis

Key Takeaways

• CRM fragmentation from M&A growth is a structural problem. Eight systems across 12 countries is not unusual for a pan-European business that has scaled through acquisitions. The data quality and operational cost it creates compounds over time.

• Legacy-to-Salesforce consolidation at enterprise scale requires a migration platform built for complexity. Manual approaches cannot absorb the scope of multi-system, multilingual consolidations without introducing the risks the project is designed to eliminate.

• ctc delivered 70% lower migration cost, 30% faster time to market, and 0 errors at go-live across 8 source systems in 12 countries. Those are measurable benchmarks, not estimates.

• Repeatability is what compresses timelines. Because ctc's framework builds on each prior cycle rather than restarting, each successive migration run is faster and more reliable than the last.

• Clean, consolidated Salesforce data is AI readiness infrastructure. Organizations deferring consolidation are also deferring their ability to extract value from AI capabilities in Salesforce.

Contact us

Managing a multi-system CRM consolidation or planning a legacy migration to Salesforce? Contact the conemis team to understand what your migration actually involves before you begin.

Explore more:

• Read the full Catella success story.
• Learn how conemis handles M&A transformations at enterprise scale  
• Explore conemis transition cloud on the Salesforce AppExchange
• Read more customer cases