By Ken Renganathan, Senior Strategic Solutions Executive
ERP system consolidations are on the rise! Over the years, large organizations have accumulated multiple ERP systems for a variety of reasons including best of breed approach and inorganic growth of business. However, a complex ERP ecosystem leads to issues related to maintainability, inconsistency, and the ability to accommodate new business functionality. It can also slow down an organization’s embrace of modern digital technologies.
Many organizations today are looking to enable a single source of the truth, deliver better user experience, reduce total cost of ownership, and facilitate more transparency and audit trails through consolidation of their ERP landscape. This may be to a select few systems or, in many cases, just one. The industry is undergoing a vast number of S4 and Fusion programs with huge investments.
While the business benefits of ERP consolidation far outweigh the time and investment required for such programs, they require meticulous planning and methodical execution – including tangible milestones delivered en route to the end-state consolidation.
One of the most common traps in ERP programs, particularly involving multiple-legacy system data, is underestimating the importance of data migration. Data migration can be complex and time consuming to the extent that it can delay and derail the entire program. Makes sense though… after all, the accuracy and completeness of data migration from disparate systems directly impacts core business processes in finance, sales and customer management, supply chain, and other business-critical elements.
Bringing in or establishing expertise in specific ERP solutions (like SAP or Oracle, to name the two most popular) is important, but organizations must also look to incorporate proven approaches that bring predictability and automation to data migration from various systems.
A comprehensive approach addresses the following key elements to improve efficiency, establish predictability, and increase cost effectiveness:
- Data validations and data load
- Automated reconciliations
- Automated functional testing
- Reduced cutover time
So how do you escape the data migration trap? My next article will highlight an automation-driven approach with “no programming” that guarantees faster and complete data migration at just 50% the cost of traditional methods.
Stay tuned…