Data Migration: A Crucial Stage of your ERP Implementation Journey
Why is data migration important for your ERP implementation?
What is data migration?
Data migration ensures that data which is essential for informed strategic decision-making is transferred accurately from your incumbent system and isn’t lost during the implementation of your new ERP. When done correctly, it ensures a seamless transition during the ERP implementation process, ensuring data integrity in the new system by inspecting, extracting, cleansing and transforming your company's historical and operational data.
Why is data migration important?
Ensuring valuable historical data is retained, securely stored, organized and can be accessed by key stakeholders once your new ERP is in place is essential, as it informs your future planning and forecasting.
An efficient data migration strategy helps to reduce the long-term costs of your ERP implementation by anticipating future requirements and eliminating potential issues and inconsistencies. By using a data migration tool which can cleanse and integrate your data from multiple data sources, you can save on the time and money involved in costly integrations, and achieve a smoother, quicker ERP cutover.
Data migration and ERP implementation
Data migration should not be overlooked as a key stage in your ERP switchover. A well-managed, efficient data migration process allows you to re-evaluate and optimize existing business processes before your new ERP system is rolled out. This will lead to improved efficiency and streamlined operations.
A seamless and accurate data migration process ensures your business has access to data which will allow you to utilize your new ERP system's data analysis, reporting and planning functionality. With 64% of data migration projects exceeding their budgets and only 46% meeting their targets1, it’s key to manage and prioritize the data migration stage to keep your overall ERP project on track.
This means your stakeholders can continue to make decisions based on the operational information, customer behavior and market trends identified in your historical data. This is crucial to providing overall context and making informed decisions that drive growth and profitability.
The risks involved in data migration
Cost of data migration
The costs involved in the data migration process can be high when all aspects of the process are taken into consideration. First, data must be extracted from the previous system, then cleansed, before restructuring and entering the data into the new ERP system. This process may seem simple, but it can add 10-15% to the overall costs of the new system so should be given adequate consideration.
Stakeholder adoption
Stakeholder adoption is key to a successful ERP implementation. Stakeholders from different business departments will have differing priorities or uses for the data in the historical system. So, ensuring that they have access to the data they need in a format that they can easily understand is vital to stakeholder adoption of the new ERP system.
Data loss
As with any data transfer, there is always a risk of losing all or part of that data. An efficient data migration process requires data that arrives from its original source in its totality, so following data migration best practice is paramount to minimizing the risk of data loss.
Security Breaches
A data breach can impact a business at any time and it's important to ensure you have a comprehensive, secure data migration process that ensures the safety of your data.
Data compliance
To ensure that your business is compliant with industry regulations, it is vital to keep historical records of data. It is paramount that your data migration ensures access to your historical data either via a data warehouse or within your new ERP.
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Mitigating the risks in data migration during ERP implementation
Planning: The key to mitigating the risks of data migration is thinking ahead. A well-planned data migration strategy will mitigate the risk of data loss or distortion during the ERP implementation process.
Choose your systems wisely: Ensuring you are using the right tools to carry out your data migration is key. Vetting them thoroughly can reduce future headaches and ensure that they are robust enough to carry out the process efficiently.
Always test first: Even if you’re diligent in your planning, it's important to conduct dry runs to pinpoint any potential issues and ensure there are no hiccups in the live process. Given that 46% of data migration projects are delayed, it's crucial to have proof of concept.
Migrate during non-working hours: Moving your critical data during non-working hours means you can still run your business operations efficiently without disrupting your staff’s (and IT’s) working days.
Utilizing a tool with an in-built data warehouse or data platform: Implementing a tool that incorporates a robust data platform as the lynchpin of your data migration can mitigate the costs and risks involved in the process, outlined above. A solution such as Naviloq – which delivers cutting-edge business intelligence and planning functionality as well as a scalable data warehouse – means you not only get a tool that will extract, cleanse and store your data, but you also get industry leading business intelligence capabilities that transform your data into useable information.
Naviloq: The data migration tool for your ERP implementation
The data migration process can be complex, risky and time consuming. But what if there was a way to remove that headache from the ERP implementation process?
Naviloq simplifies the data migration process by storing all your transactions and historical data in its built-in data warehouse. Meaning your data migration process will include two steps:
Step One:
Import core records such as customers, suppliers, inventory and service items into your new ERP system, ensuring you can analyze historical headline data.
Step Two:
Then create transactions in your new ERP to point to the transactional and historical data, such as product, range or transaction date etc., that's housed in Naviloq’s data warehouse.
About Naviloq – the origin story
Naviloq is the revolutionary BI & Planning tool that was created by Staria’s team of finance experts who have decades of client-side experience in combating the barriers to BI and planning tool adoption. The tool was built on four key pillars which provide you with united intelligence and support an efficient data migration for your ERP project.
Built-in data warehouse: Securely store your migrated data in Naviloq’s data warehouse which is capable of amalgamating data from multiple sources.
No-code interface: Naviloq's user friendly interface allows key stakeholders to have oversight of and access to key data, as well as the ability to build reports easily without technical knowledge.
Planning and forecasting: Naviloq provides an agile and customizable budgeting and forecasting tool for your organization’s migrated data.
Collaboration: Share meaningful insights from your migrated data with people in your business, in a format they’ll understand.
Conclusion
The importance of the data migration process shouldn’t be underestimated. As a crucial stage of the ERP implementation process it should be given appropriate time and consideration. If done incorrectly it can delay and disrupt your ERP implementation.
By using Naviloq for your data migration you can seamlessly go through the data migration process whilst utilizing its data warehousing tool to store your historical data. Then, moving forward, use Naviloq’s BI & planning capabilities to carry out in-depth analysis of your data to meaningfully plan for the future.