ERP Consulting: The conversion process explained
In today's video, we're going to talk about data conversion.
The Data Conversion Process
You are moving from a legacy system that you've had for the last 25 to 30 years. In some cases, it's an a S 400. It's a green screen that's riddled with manual processes, that has Excel sheets as workarounds to workarounds and not one repository of data. So how do you take all of that data and move it to your new E R P system? The first question you should ask yourself is, how much data do I want to convert? How much data does the organization need going forward? How much do you want to look back into history and how much do you want to archive and put away into a read only database or some other format that if needed, you can go back and look into? This is a key element of data conversions. They can tend to bo down your implementation process and push out GoLive, or not make the system usable.
So it's really important that we think about how much data, how do you wanna convert it, and does it really make sense for you to have 30 plus years of data coming forward to a new solution? When you use multiple systems, it also adds complexity. You might have financials in one system. You might have work order information in another system, and if you're going to a consolidated system, you have to make sure that these data elements are compatible with each other, and it just adds a lot of complexity to the conversion process. When you have an older system, the data may not be compatible. Sometimes you just get gibberish out of your older system and you have to spend months on end cleaning up this data. So it's compatible with the newer system. You have old purchase orders, you have all inventory records on paper that are not in any system.
The transactional data only exists on paper. How are you going to take that to a newer system? It's really important to think about what's useful and what's not. It's nice to have when you have a look back for into 30 years of data. But is it going to be useful to you in the new system to have all this data bogging down your implementation process? In my experience, the best methodology for data conversion is to take a few years of transactional data, even one year of transactional data and balances forward for the last three to five years. Again, it depends on what module you're talking about. For finance, that might work for an HR module, it might not, because you need historical data for payroll purposes, benefits administration. So upfront, we need to really determine what's important to us, what it's going to take to convert this data and how it's going to be taken to a new system.
The Vendor’s Involvement
The vendor, when they come in to the implementation, will give you formats that are comparable to their new system. So it might be in a CSV file, it might be in an Excel file. They'll give you what headers are required for what modules, and what kind of data needs to be in there, in what format. Keep in mind this is a lot of work. It might seem like it's just an export for old, from an old system going into a new system. It's not that easy. Like I said, older systems may have incompatible formats that you have to manually massage and spend hours and days and months on to put into a newer system, which is why it's really critical to not spend time on manual massaging of data for 30 years of data. From a financial standpoint, you may only want to look at what happened in the last two budget years just so you can plan for the future.
If you really need to go back and look at historical data, there's a lot more opportunity to do that from an offline system that stays in your servers or in the cloud. That is not transactional. The conversion process tends to be time consuming. The conversion process can, if not done correctly, it can bring in some really bad data and corrupt anything going forward. It's really important to realize that data conversion and how much data you move forward is critical to your operations. The vendor will give you the format to convert data in, but more often than not, they won't help you with the data conversion or you'll have to spend gobs of money for their staff to do data conversion for you. If you need help with data conversion and thinking through how much data to bring forward, please reach out to Avera Advisors today.