ERP Data Migration Best Practices

Although moving ERP to the cloud poses important platform and software-specific considerations, the basics of a sound cloud migration remain consistent, regardless of your vendor or host. Here are 5 ERP data migration best practices every company should follow.

1. Set Right-Sized Migration Goals

The IT industry often makes enterprises feel left behind. While market hype plays a role, the main problem is the sheer pace of change. For vendors, it makes sense to develop new tools and upgrade existing ones extremely quickly, but for users, upgrading can be a difficult, expensive and disruptive process. They need to vet any change extremely carefully, which takes time.

That means there are often good reasons to be technologically conservative. Whatever vendors say, sometimes the best first step is making a modest change, such as migrating to Suite on HANA instead of S/4HANA.

You don’t have to transform your entire landscape in one go. If you’re cautious, start with a simple ERP cloud data migration or upgrade to prove ROI, and save IT transformation for later — as long as you keep that transformation in sight.

2. Consider Your Whole Cloud Strategy

ERP data migration best practices call for a multi-dimensional approach, considering business and strategic goals, as well as technological goals. Over time, tech will continue to change your industry, and you will need to adopt new tools like automation and big data analytics to stay competitive. Even if you’re taking your first step into cloud ERP, you need to be working towards longer-term goals.

3. Choose a Committed Cloud Data Migration Partner

A cloud migration doesn’t end at go live — your IT team needs to tune and tweak your landscape, monitor changes in demand and technology, and work with you to plan the next transformation. Choose a team who can stand beside you through it all. Not only will this make go-lives smoother (since your team will already know your landscape), it will also help you stay the course and accomplish your medium and long-term IT goals.

4. Set Meaningful, Measurable Benchmarks

Make sure your benchmarks address your cloud migration goals. If you’re looking to decrease hosting costs, what are you paying right now? How much do you plan to save, and how quickly should you break even? If you’re concerned with performance, take the time to study your end user response time. How much quicker would your new landscape have to be to be worth the investment?

Setting meaningful benchmarks will ensure you achieve the benefits of cloud migration, and make it easier to sell future IT upgrades by demonstrating ROI.

5. Adopt a Managed Services Model

Managed services providers can remove the burden of handling IT internally, lower costs and increase efficiency. By working at scale, MSPs provide a level of service that very few companies can afford internally, with 24/7/365 monitoring, redundant internal support and rigorous quality control. For an ERP data migration, an MSP also provides a seasoned team, practiced at working together to accomplish a successful migration. Contact us to learn how Protera can help.