Organizations switch their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to improve their financial and operational data reporting capabilities and help their finance teams become better strategic partners. These implementations are major projects, and many organizations encounter complications that might be easy to avoid. One of the most prevalent barriers to a seamless ERP implementation is data migration. Extracting and validating data from legacy systems into a new ERP can be arduous for most users, but it’s crucial for getting the new solution off the ground to address your core business needs quickly, effectively and without errors.
Organizations need to address data migration issues to improve their ERP implementation and their long-term health. A reliable implementation allows your users to start utilizing the new system’s features more efficiently. Technology is only effective if people adopt it, and a slow and complicated implementation diminishes users’ trust in the solution and postpones the time when they can start training and integrating it into processes as needed.
Beginning with a solid foundation of accurate data also is essential to managing business operations properly. Business needs can change quickly, and you must be able to handle them in the same manner.
Many organizations can’t successfully migrate legacy data because of a few crucial barriers. Most don’t have in-house data migration experts or staff with the skills needed to accomplish the migration effectively. So typically, you’re trying to achieve a quick and accurate data migration without the right people.
Without the right resources, you significantly increase your risk because imported data isn’t necessarily validated or verified correctly. Then, teams need to review the inputted data manually to pinpoint the errors. Or worse, errors aren’t caught, and you make future decisions based on shaky data.
Data reverification just adds more time for the migration team, which highlights a larger issue of in-house data migration: it takes employees away from strategic tasks that truly enable the organization to thrive.
Business leaders are consistently trying to glean better insights from their data. But you can’t do this with antiquated systems and information. And when you invest in a new solution to aid data analysis and reporting, it’s essential to set it up properly rather than struggling to get it off the ground due to a lack of expertise or time. This lack of planning prevents your finance team from focusing on the strategic work they excel at and causes downstream risks.
By outsourcing the data migration process to experts, you can eliminate many of the complications associated with an ERP implementation and dramatically lessen future risks. Outsourced data migration can reduce the time spent on the implementation from start to finish, by mitigating downstream data entry errors and reducing downtime in the implementation by minimizing back-and-forth communications and eliminating data reverification. As a result, you can begin leveraging your optimized solution sooner and rest assured that the migrated data is accurate for future insights.
When you are sure you have verified data, your finance team can focus on the core strategic tasks necessary for your business operations. They also don’t need to wait on troubleshooting erroneous data or backtracking to fix errors during the implementation, which means a much faster time-to-value for your investment.
These mitigated challenges can help your organization lower employee overhead requirements. Those saved hours and efforts can help employees return to strategic tasks, while also benefitting from an improved solution that allows more informed and quicker insights into your organization’s core business needs.
Armanino helps clients navigate data migration and achieve their end goals using a combination of next-generation technologies and expert data migration strategies. Contact our experts to learn more.
