When animals migrate, they typically don’t leave members of the flock behind. The term calls to mind the image of a huge, loosely organised movement that involves everyone.
Your Cloud ERP migration should take the same form.
When data technicians and business executives talk about enterprise resource management (ERP) migration, they often have the same picture in mind. The immediate assumption is that the new system should include all the data that the old one had.
This is an expensive and risky assumption to make as there might be entire systems and data categories for which migration doesn’t add value. The alternative—leaving less-critical data in an accessible legacy system—doesn’t always feel as neat and clean as a total migration does, but it can save serious time and money while preventing headaches all around.
Why Keep Data on Legacy Systems?
Making the decision to implement a new Cloud ERP system doesn’t automatically mean that the old one is now useless. Executives that carefully analyze their prime motives for the Cloud ERP upgrade might find areas where a new system doesn’t add sufficient value to merit the cost of migration.
For example, an organization may keep rarely used, non-critical business functions on a legacy system and then eventually wrap that system in a RESTful API. Doing so essentially automates the process of obtaining data from the legacy system without actually replacing it.
This approach is common in highly regulated industries. Government and financial institutions can’t simply upgrade their systems without steep oversight and regulatory approval, but they also have to expose business processes on the Internet and offer modern services at the same time.
While most of today’s organisations aren’t forced to balance their needs between legacy systems and new Cloud ERP technology, they can often save a great deal of time and money doing so. Corporate stakeholders tend to appreciate strategies that save valuable resources in this way.
How to Choose Which Data Makes the Cut
Migrating everything can be a deceptively easy decision to make. Choosing between multiple systems and processes and selecting only the most valuable ones involves lots of hard ones.
Without a comprehensive ERP audit, it’s almost impossible to accurately determine which data should move and which data should stay. Hiring a highly qualified consultant should already be a part of your Cloud ERP migration plan, though.
Because every business is organised in a different way, only a detailed audit of your particular business structure can lead to a reliable outlook. However, most Cloud ERP implementations share some key traits that can help executives looking for general orientation:
- Focus on What ERPs Do Best. The typical ERP plays an instrumental role in supporting internal and administrative processes in the company. It may be less helpful with other processes, like collecting payments or sending invoices.
- Find Compatible Third-Party Vendors. Often, the choice to leave data and systems out of the migration process hinges on the fact that a cheaper, more efficient solution exists through a third-party vendor. Successfully integrating a third-party solution can be far more cost-effective than loading everything onto a single platform.
- Prioritize the Data’s Value. Migrating core business data is an obvious value-generating move. Beyond these assets, organisations should rely on an experienced consultant to qualify the value of every data category potentially up for migration.
Consider Your Deployment Strategy
If your company is positioning itself for a phased approach, there will be a tense transition period where comprehensive data-gathering can lead to important insights on transition efficiency. This is also true of parallel operation deployments. Align your choice of data migration to the specific needs of your deployment strategy with the input of a qualified ERP consultant.
Get in touch with the SMB Solutions team to get help with your cloud ERP migration today.