ERP System Implementation Critical Success Factor: Proper Planning and Execution of a Data Migration Strategy

To be able to make a well-informed decision about what data to migrate, manufacturing and distribution organizations would be well-advised to start with the target of where they want to be with their new system and work backwards.

Assuming there is any reasonable amount of legacy data, the decision to migrate existing data to the new ERP system rather than manually rekey the data becomes obvious.  Data can be categorized into five main buckets:

• Core base data: including products, customers, prospects, vendors, and associated contacts;
• Pricing data: customer pricing and vendor pricing;
• Facilities, manufacturing, and product unit of measure conversion data: including bills of material, formulations, and routings; facilities layouts including zones, locations, and bins; and product-specific unit of measure conversion factors;
• Historical data: sales history which can be used as an input to generate a forecast and for sales analysis purposes; and
• Open transactions and beginning balances: including open sales orders, open purchase orders, open sales quotes, open returns, open customer invoices (accounts receivable), open vendor invoices (accounts payable), and general ledger balances by account; these items must tie to corresponding values in the legacy system (i.e., inventory stock status, general ledger trial balance, aged accounts receivable by customer, and aged accounts payable by vendor).

Once the data migration strategy is defined, the next step for the ERP implementation project team is to execute that strategy successfully.  Data migration tends to be an iterative process which can be run three to five times during software implementation.  After each test migration, the data must be analyzed thoroughly to make sure the resulting data in the new system is correct and matches up with proper expectations and comparable data in the legacy system.

For a new ERP system to function properly and provide accurate transactions and business information to be trusted for analysis purposes, the core data, which is the lifeblood of the new system, must be accurate.  The migration of data from legacy systems is a critical success factor for ERP software implementation.