Andrea Jones walks through data migration for ERP systems. A customer's CSV exports were prepared wrong and caught late, requiring field mapping and validation. She recommends running migration again at cutover to capture recent changes.
Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and today we're going to continue on our ERP implementation series of videos. In the last one we talked about how the project manager is facilitating the major milestone activities. So the data migration, the system configuration, the point to point testing, the conference room pilot, the end user training, user acceptance testing, cutover preparations, actually going live, and hypercare. So those are the main milestones today. I want to talk a little bit more about the specifics with something that is a big pain point for a lot of people, data migration. So I said in the last video, you typically from your system vendor will get a bunch of spreadsheet templates for data that they will then upload into the system to seed your system initially. You'll have to do this again right at cutover because of course over the however long, maybe nine months doing implementation, some of that information will change. Mostly you'll add things to it. You might add new parts, new products, new customer orders, inventory management, inventory will change levels, things like that. But let's talk a little bit more about the data migration itself. We had a customer once that was given all those templates and it has fields in the top, maybe it's company name. If there's a contact or key contact, it might have multiple columns for that. You know, if the customer, it'll have address. If it's a supplier, it probably also has address. If it's a part, it'll have a part number. You know, there are all kinds of pieces of information about the data that you need to know. And these different spreadsheets will be houses for all of that information again to get uploaded. And this customer was asked by the vendor, they gave them the templates, they said, hey, fill these out and stick them on a SharePoint drive so that we can review those and make sure that they're uploaded in time for your conference room pilot. Okay? The customer downloaded the data out of their old system into CSV file. They, you know, copied and pasted what they thought was appropriate and stuck them up on the shared Drive or the SharePoint. And then like nine months went by. They didn't tell the vendor that the data migration tables were there. And a lot of things happened. You know, we weren't actually working with them yet. A lot of things happened. For various reasons, no one looked at this information until about a month before they were going to do the conference room pilot. The vendor finally looked at them and said, oh, these are wrong, you need to go and fix it. By then, nine months had gone by. It was clearly Very frustrating. That's actually when they hired us and they hired us to help them with data migration. They're like, we did the best we could. We thought we did it right. How, how come it's not correct? And the vendor didn't have time to dive deep and help them. So we went in there and did that. And we were able to, with their subject matter expertise, map the data they pulled out of their old system into the format and the column headers that needed to be done in a new system. And then you can write some macros for that in spreadsheets so that it can automatically do it for every one of, I think it was 39 data migration templates they had to have uploaded into the new system. So for 39 spreadsheets, you know, you had to do this. And there were some things that you can do in the macro as well, like looking for fields that were redundant or fields that had no information, maybe an address that was missing or zip code that was missing or off by a digit or low by a digit, or whatever it would be. So you can create almost like a formula, right? Like, here's your old stuff, here's your new stuff, and then you can reuse that when it comes to cutover. So we are able to do this at ajc, even if that's all we do for you, we can do that. We understand that there are some softwares out there that perhaps use AI and might be able to do this as well. I'm going to assume, because we've not used them yet, that you're still going to have to look over those. So it's not a total, like, done deal. Just put them in and hit the button, easy button, and it's, you know, uploaded and you're all good. But data migration is a big pain point for a lot of companies, and that's a good reason why. It's kind of like when you move houses and you have your junk drawer, do you want to just dump all the junk into a big paper bag and then dump it into the junk drawer into the new house? No, I mean, you'd rather filter through it, pitch the stuff that's really old and you don't need any more. The pens that no longer have ink and the rubber bands that you just stuck in there, and little scraps of paper and old notes and whatever it is, you don't necessarily need to move that over to the new house. That's the same as data, you know, I mean, if you've got a customer that you had 10 years ago that's never bought from you again. Maybe they've even gone out of business. Do you really need to input that information into the new system? Probably not. So those are the types of things that you'll look for in data migration. We're happy to help. It does have to be done, like I said, to seed your sandbox and your instance so that you can do testing and you can work within your environment and. And then it has to be done again so that you have the most current information when you go live. All right, thanks for watching.
