By Stephan Romeder*
Whether you’re changing ERP, CRM, or other central applications, transferring data between systems is never a simple task. The complexity of data-migration jobs often results in cost overruns and delays. Mistakes made during migrations can lead to costly downtime, diminished end-user productivity, and the loss of important data.
But if you do the necessary preparation work and fully think through the process, you can avoid some of the most common data migration disasters. Here are seven tips to keep your data migration project on track:
Don’t migrate your bad habits. Things may have started out perfect, but it’s more than likely that data inconsistencies and data duplication were introduced over time with multiple users. So it’s important to sanitise the data before the moving the data over. Make sure you de-duplicate data and fix any data integrity problems before the problems are replicated in your new system.
Your company’s business and validation rules may have changed since the legacy system was first built. Now is the time to make sure that the businesses rules are current and any questions or disputed processes are ironed out. Also it is advisable to see if there are any data fields that need to be changed or added, and that the necessary validations are included in the new database.
