QAD

Data Migration: The Key to a Successful ERP Upgrade

Publish Date: October 17, 2023

Data migration is essential when upgrading your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This crucial process involves transferring data from one system to another, ensuring its accuracy and completeness while minimizing disruptions to your business operations. Achieving efficient data migration is vital for a successful ERP upgrade as it ensures that critical information is preserved and readily accessible in the new system. This blog presents a step-by-step process to help organizations navigate the complexities of data migration and achieve a seamless ERP upgrade. Before delving into the details, let’s understand the importance of efficient data migration.

Why is data migration necessary for ERP upgrades?

The data migration process is critical in ensuring that the data in the upgraded ERP system is accurate and complete. This is crucial because many individuals across different areas of your organization rely on historical data. A well-planned data migration strategy can help keep your entire ERP implementation or upgrade project on track, ensuring it stays within the designated timeline and budget. It also presents an opportunity to eliminate outdated and redundant data lurking in your older systems. In contrast, neglecting to prioritize data migration can lead to inaccurate or duplicate data, posing challenges to your go-live date and subsequent business operations.

Here’s why efficient data migration is critical to a successful ERP upgrade:

Data Integrity: Accurate and dependable data is crucial for business success. Precise data migration during ERP upgrades is necessary to prevent adverse impacts on business processes.
Business Continuity: Ensuring a seamless migration of data is crucial for minimizing any disturbance to daily activities during an upgrade, and uninterrupted access to critical information plays an essential role in maintaining business continuity.
Decision-Making: Informed decision-making heavily relies on ERP systems. Executives require accurate and up-to-date data to make well-informed choices and practical strategies.
Avoiding Costly Errors: Migrating data inefficiently can result in costly errors such as data loss, record duplication, and production delays, which can have serious financial consequences for the company.
User Adoption: For higher user adoption rates and better acceptance of the upgraded ERP platform, it is essential to ensure accurate and easily accessible migration of employee data. This will help smooth the transition process.
Regulatory Compliance: Ensuring compliance with data protection and privacy laws is crucial for many industries, and a smooth data migration process can help avoid any possible legal or financial consequences.
Efficient Workflows: Seamless data migration can enhance workflow efficiency and optimize business processes, ultimately boosting productivity.
Data Analysis: Organizations consider data a precious resource, and the effectiveness of data migration plays a crucial role in ensuring that historical data is readily accessible for analysis, reporting, and identifying trends.

However, upgrading your ERP system can require effort when transferring data from your current system. Some of the challenges you may face include:

Financial resources: The necessary funds, time, and skilled personnel are essential to effectively carry out the data migration project. Without sufficient resources, Organizations may not be able to attain their objectives.
Duplicate records: Editing data during migration to eliminate inconsistencies and duplicates is essential. This can be a complex task, especially when dealing with data from multiple sources. Uniform formatting of the data can take time to achieve.
Compliance issues: Organizations must process and store the data effectively to comply with the law. If the business is operating globally, there will be a need to follow more regulations. Compliance with all these regulations can be a challenge during ERP data migration.

It is, therefore, necessary to implement the most effective methods for smoothly migrating data to an upgraded ERP system from the current one. Let us explore what these best practices entail.

Prepare for data migration by allocating enough resources and starting early. Don’t just lift and shift data without proper preparation. Use automation and tools to simplify the process, reduce costs, and control the timeline.
To migrate data to an upgraded ERP system, assemble a team of experts from different departments. Assign someone to clean up the data and develop rules for high-quality data. IT employees should support data owners by identifying data flow and sources. A well-rounded plan ensures a successful transition.
Before importing data into the ERP system, analyze and map it thoroughly. Identify redundancies or inconsistencies and match the data to the ERP database structure. Consider using automated data mapping technology to discover and resolve quality issues, duplicates, and critical data elements.
Older systems may contain ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) data, such as outdated customer or supplier information. Historical transaction data may also be stored. Not all data must be carried over when switching to an upgraded ERP system. Scrubbing and standardizing data is not automatic. Identifying only critical data elements can reduce costs and simplify the system.

Why YASH?

At YASH Technologies, we have a Data Migration CoE with a team of skilled data migration experts with vast experience in information strategy, business consulting, and a deep understanding of various Data Migration Technologies. The QAD team has completed several data migration engagements, working collaboratively with expert teams from the Data Migration CoE. Our approach is structured to ensure that all relevant data is migrated within your project timelines while managing data quality to meet your business’s and target environment’s needs. We strive to minimize interruptions to your business and deliver effective, low-cost migration. We aim to reduce the risk of data loss or corruption and simplify data architecture to achieve QAD data migration on time and within budget to ensure business continuity.

To know more, contact us at info@yash.com.