Challenges in data migration:
Traditionally in SAP implementations, the customer is asked to provide data in a particular format at a certain stage of the project. Many organizations find themselves to be in deep trouble because of the complex nature of the data requirements of the SAP and the non availability of data in their current/ legacy applications. This leads to many questions like:
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How can I prepare data for SAP?
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Where do I find the data to load into SAP?
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What is the state of that data?
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What is the process to get trusted data into SAP?
Without a proper plan many customers proceed with the implementation. Typically an ideal data migration effort takes up about 25-30% of the total implementation project. Due to sheer ignorance clients end up provision just 10% of their effort in data migration and in turn end up spending about 50% of the effort cleansing bad data post Go Live.
Need for a Data Migration framework and tool
It is not enough to just prepare and migrate the data to the newly built SAP system, the data has to be cleansed, profiled, and validated. This calls for a structured framework, robust methodology and investments in software/tools.
In my next blog, i will also speak about the various options availale within data migration and may be some best practices.
