This is a follow on to my post of data migration for AX.
Migrating data from one system to another provides a rare opportunity for many companies. The chance to clean, update, re-arrange and add new data is one of the biggest selling points of moving to a new ERP. The problem is that doing this can significantly impact the length of time a data migration can take.
Basic data migration is relatively easy and can be done relatively quickly. With a good data map and cross-reference every company should be able to able complete migration on schedule. Data transformation takes time and resources, and will probably side-track your schedule.
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Migrating data from one system to another provides a rare opportunity for many companies. The chance to clean, update, re-arrange and add new data is one of the biggest selling points of moving to a new ERP. The problem is that doing this can significantly impact the length of time a data migration can take.
Basic data migration is relatively easy and can be done relatively quickly. With a good data map and cross-reference every company should be able to able complete migration on schedule. Data transformation takes time and resources, and will probably side-track your schedule.
Where it all goes wrong
The answer is usually simple - multiple data sources handled by multiple people will multiply your time. Why? These processes are usually done by multiple people in multiple departments providing opportunity for multiple issues. For example, the Item Master is a particularly notorious area. Marketing wants new fields, Finance wants new controls or costing information, production wants to re-work BOM's, Customer Service wants easier look-up, Sales wants more information from Customers... Each of these changes is usually done in isolation, often on uncontrolled/unversioned Excel spreadsheets. Users change or add columns making previous integration's fail, or users only update some items, breaking other down-stream processes. The result is many iterations and a migration that doesn't complete in your time frame. The same process can impact Customers, Vendors, Sales Orders and many other migrations at many companies.Controlling the process
There are a number of relatively easy steps to control this process and achieve a successful migration and on-time go-live.- Make sure every process/migration has a single owner who understands the who, what, why, when and how of each part of the process. This owner should NOT be in IT.
- Take a real serious look at if the changes are required - your business runs successfully on this data today, is it worth every change to miss your target?
- Can you complete changes in the source system. This will simplify the migration process and provide benefits before you go-live.
- Can you complete changes post go-live? Are all the new attribute and reporting fields really needed on day 1? Can you do those updates after go-live?
- Where possible avoid multiple spreadsheets with data entered by multiple people. This is a recipe for disaster. Make everything controlled or use a program like Access or SQL tables to update the data.
- Consider hand-keying some data. What is the cost of time and resources to complete migration versus paying someone to type?
- Consider using a standard data migration to get data into AX and then using a SQL update statement to add missing fields.