Data migration is the process of moving required volume of data from legacy systems to new ERP systems. Special utilities are available for data migration both from ERP vendors and third party vendors.

To complete the ERP implementation one would need to migrate master data, including customer master, material master, budget head, employee list etc from legacy systems. Large number of earlier transaction would also be transported to the ERP system. In a typical corporation these would call for significant amount of data transport.

Often they may not be available in machine-readable form. Often manual data will have inconsistencies such as incorrect code numbers, multiple code numbers to represent the same item, misspellings etc that needs data cleansing. Data cleansing itself could be a major activity. Even if data is available in machine-readable form, it may be distributed across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. Reasonable amount of effort must be spent in reconciling such data.

A good data migration should allow one to:

Reduce risk: Data being an organization's most critical business asset, it is essential that any manipulation be carried out without any disruption.

Lower operational expenses: Data migration is a one-off activity triggered by certain circumstances. The data migration tool or solution reinforces the organization's resources which can remain focused on its ongoing continuous core activities.

Improve data quality: The cleansing and correction solutions ensure perfect data integrity after it has been migrated. From a user and development perspective, the migrated data results are completely optimized.

From a user perspective, the data migration solutions should make sure that a strategy is put in place to achieve maximum flexibility and quality.

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