Your item master, your retailer feeds, your syndicated file and your planning system each describe the same product differently. Harmonization maps all of them into one schema, yours, so the data joins instead of being reconciled by hand every quarter.
A crosswalk is easy to build once and hard to keep honest.
The target is the taxonomy your teams already plan and report against. Asking a business to adopt someone else's taxonomy is how harmonization projects turn into reorganization projects and then stop.
Some paths genuinely have two defensible homes in your tree. Those come back as a decision for you rather than a coin flip made quietly inside a model, because a mapping nobody chose is a mapping nobody will defend in a review.
Retailers reshuffle their taxonomies on their own schedule and tell nobody. The crosswalk is re-checked on a schedule agreed with you, so a path that moved is caught as a change to review rather than found six weeks later as a hole in a report.
Thirteen systems, thirteen category paths, and the one row your teams report against.
Mapping a system in is wasted if the values inside it are wrong. The two jobs are usually the same project.
One field, 146 distinct values, and what each of the wrong ones should have said.
Thirty minutes on your categories. How the attributes get built, and the questions your team could put to them.
