Six Steps to Include in Your ERP Migration Plan

What is ERP?

ERPs can be used to automate and simplify individual activities across businesses or organizations, such as accounting and procurement, project management, CRM, risk management, and supply chain operations.

Examples of ERP system modules include product lifecycle management, supply chain management, customer relationship management, sales order processing, online sales, financials, and decision support system.

ERP Software connects every aspect of an enterprise. An ERP system allows for better performance and project management that help plan, budget, and accurately report on an organization’s financial health and processes.

Here are given six steps are all important parts of an ERP migration. These six steps are not independent your ERP migration will take you up and back down these steps and sometimes you will jump the back down two or more steps.

1. Obtain Executive Backing

Get c-level support before embarking on your project. Without it, your ERP system migration will certainly fail to deliver the results that you want. The entire executive group is should back the efforts or at least not hinder them. One executive will be your sponsor who will help grease the wheels when you need the support.

2. Prioritize Needs

You will have many objectives you hope for from the ERP system. Some are common to all and others are mainly the concern of certain different departments. Achieving the priority needs is mandatory. There will also be lesser needs that are good to have but not necessarily critical to success.

3. Test and Retest

With those needs in mind run tests on every part of the new ERP system. Did you get the expected result?  Change some configuration settings and try again until you get the best result needed and move to the next test. After the second one passes a retest the first one to see if anything is changed because of the settings made for the second test. Imported data will often affect the test and some field you thought you could skip turns out to be the required. Another field in the legacy needed to be modified to work with the new ERP system.

4. Import Data

There are static kinds of data such as the part numbers and some customer records. These do are change but usually at a slow pace. There are some dynamic data are such as the transaction records that are updated continuously. Often there are data that must be loaded sequentially as some fields are dependent on other fields. Some data in the legacy will not directly translate and must be modified. Develop a plan for import around your testing.

5. Clean Up Data

Look at the careful data in your legacy ERP system. Some might be so old there is no reason to import it and some might relate to a business process that is no longer used. Something is just junk such as purchase orders that were assigned but never actually used.  You probably have some unfinished transactions and that will not import such as a qualities inspection that was are never done.

6. Follow through with staff training

First, develop a training program and everyone in the enterprise should understand the project and how it relates to the company and them individually. Users of all kinds in every department must have trained so they can start work right away after ERP system migrations. Ongoing training should be ready to support new hires and job changes and remedial training as needed.