Cloud ERP Data Migration: Data Streaming in an ERP World

According to Gartner, over half of major new business platforms will leverage continuous intelligence (CI). Continuous intelligence involves using real-time analytics to process current and historical data to guide decision-making.

Adopting CI technologies and concepts can elevate your business above its competitors and ensure you continue thriving within your industry.

However, before you can stream and analyze data in real time, you’ll need to sunset your legacy systems and replace them with a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Moving your enterprise data to a leading-edge platform will require a sound cloud-based ERP system migration strategy.

Why Choose a Cloud-Based ERP System?

Investing in migration to cloud ERP technology like SAP S/4 HANA offers many benefits to enterprises. Most notably, migrating ERP data to the cloud can help your organization.

Avoid Costly Downtime

Aging on-premise solutions are more prone to downtime. Depending on your organization, even a few hours of unplanned downtime can cost you thousands or millions of dollars in lost productivity.

In addition, if the disruption impacts your customers, you may suffer lasting brand damage. An ERP cloud migration can promote exceptional uptime and help your organization avoid a nightmarish systems failure.

Reduce Strain on Resources

A successful cloud-based ERP system migration will give you access to robust tools and workflow automation capabilities. You can use these functionalities to reduce the strain on your existing resources and effectively do more with less.

Decrease Operating Expenditures

While a cloud-based ERP system migration requires an upfront investment, you’ll enjoy a strong return and experience cost-savings across multiple fronts. Besides safeguarding your business against costly downtime, moving to a cloud ERP platform will decrease your operating expenditures.

Furthermore, platforms like SAP S/4HANA are easier and cheaper to operate, as your staff will no longer have to maintain complex on-premise hardware.

Promote Data-Driven Decision-Making

Following your cloud ERP data migration, you can stream and analyze data in real time. You can combine inbound information with historical data to detect trends, predict demand, and capitalize on emerging growth opportunities.

5 Proven Strategies to Support Your Cloud-Based ERP System Migration

You need a great game plan to set the stage for a smooth cloud ERP data migration. Here are six proven strategies and techniques to support your migration.

1. Define Your Scope

Before you embark on any new project, you must take the time to define its scope. You should apply this same approach to your cloud ERP data migration.

First, identify the sources you plan on pulling data from. These may include external drives, a different business application, or on-site servers.

Get your mission-critical stakeholders involved in this process to ensure that all relevant data is preserved. Additionally, determine what formats your data is in, as you’ll need to convert all these disparate data sets to the same format before exporting the information to your cloud ERP.

2. Create a Migration Team

Next, you’ll need to build a specialized migration team. Your team should include personnel from across your organization. Remember, the cloud ERP data migration will impact everyone. As such, the needs of every department should be represented in your planning process.

Seek out individuals within your organization who are familiar with ERP data migration strategies and techniques. If no one on your staff has such experience, consider bringing in an outside consultant to assist with your transition to a cloud ERP.

Without the right resources and expertise in place, it’s possible that your migration could take 18 months or longer.

3. Establish Clear Standards

As part of your cloud ERP data migration, you’ll need to transfer information from various sources to your new platform. You’ll likely find yourself sourcing data from written records, legacy applications, spreadsheets, and other software solutions.

Before you can transition information from these disparate sources to your cloud ERP, you must translate it. To ensure this process goes smoothly, you’ll need to create clear standards that outline what data is being brought over and what format they must be converted to.

Setting detailed, easy-to-follow standards will support your migration efforts and keep everyone on the same page when things get hectic.

4. Clean and Reconcile Your Records

Once you’ve identified what data is staying, you can simply port them over to your cloud ERP system, right? Not quite. You must start anew with fresh, clean data to get the most out of your latest technology investment.

Cleaning data involves remedying errors, deleting duplicate files, and fixing or removing incomplete documents. As you can imagine, cleaning data from several disparate sources is daunting.

Fortunately, plenty of tools can help streamline the process, such as the Syniti Knowledge Platform (SKP) and the IBM Data Readiness Assessment. By taking advantage of these tools, you can eliminate much of the hassle associated with data cleaning and accelerate your move to SAP S/4HANA.

5. Test, Validate, Repeat

The final strategy to support your cloud-based ERP data migration involves testing and validating your process. To do this, upload small batches of data to ensure that they function properly in the new cloud environment. If you encounter an issue, you’ll need to revise the data and repeat the process.

Often, organizations find that they must perform additional data cleaning during the testing phase.

Secondary cleaning may be necessary if historical data doesn’t fit the parameters of the cloud ERP solution or has somehow been invalidated. These adjustments should be relatively minor if you thoroughly cleaned your data during the reconciliation stage.

Syniti—Your Cloud ERP Data Migration Partner

Syniti and our bundled data-management solutions can support your cloud ERP data migration efforts. Our replication, matching, and migration tools assist with data cleaning, deduplication, and reconciliation.

To learn more about our technology solutions and the many benefits they offer, schedule a demo with our Data Experts today.