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What are some cost effective ways to transfer data into your ERP system?
What are some cost effective ways that you have found for getting data into your ERP system?
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2 Answers
Paul,
Your focus should be placed on getting data migration right, the first time. If your focus is on cost containment, there's a increased likelihood that your migration efforts will have to be redone.
Poor data migration is a leading cause of ERP failure (Google "Westjet data migration" to learn about a big-time, recent failure). When looking to save on implementation costs, data migration is not an area that should be cut back.
An ERP system's ability to provide accurate reporting, forecasting, BI, planning, etc depends on the quality of the underlying data. As the axiom goes: "garbage in, garbage out".
Here are my keys to data migration:
1) Develop a migration strategy that deals with data location, cleansing and maintaining correctness
2) Develop different ERP environments to test quality, control, parameters, etc.
3) Develop a matrix to track key migration information about each type of data, including: data source,the type of data (static or dynamic), the cleansing method, the migration method and the “maintaining correctness” method.
4) Develop a migration schedule that considers the type of data (static or dynamic), the burden on the implementation team, and the validity of the data.
I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
Jonathan
We like to do a test migration of master file and open item data, and use this "playground" company to do our testing and training on. The "live" company database will have master file data, and the open items will have to be transferred at the cut off date and balanced to the old system. We have found that history info is very difficult to migrate and should really be avoided. The legacy system should be kept operational for this purpose, and slowly phased out, or history reports printed to an archive file. There are also lots of different utilities we have used such as Monarch, will allow you to print a report to a file, and then parse it into a database file, which can be imported as a CSV file, for example. We have found that each situation is different depending on what you are migrating from and what you are migrating to.
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