What is Data Migration?
Data is one of the most important parts of your business. Without it you’re unable to gauge your success – your total sales, costs, customer database, etc – data is the most element that helps you understand where your business is and where you want to take it.
As part of our services, data migration is an integral part of moving your system over to a new platform. This step ensures that once you’re up and running, you can continue running your business without a hitch. But data migration can be a complex phase of moving software systems that can be confusing to understand.
What is data migration?
Put simply, data migration is method of collating your business data and moving from its existing system to a new system. In most cases, the need to do this is driven by a change in process or an investment in a new application to support your business operations.
Is data migration easy?
The simple answer is no. There are some risks associated with data migration if there is no strategy behind collating and moving the data, which is why it’s important you use an expert to complete this for you. Inaccurate migrations can cause a number of issues including:
- Incorrect data mapping
- Issues causes by previous manual entering of data
- Potential data loss
- Data corruption
These are scary risks to consider but this doesn’t mean that data migration is something to ignore. To ensure your systems are efficient, secure, and accurate, moving to a new system like DEAR inventory management or Xero can reduce downtime, speed up processes and limit the volume of manual data entry that is sucking time from your day-to-day operations.
What does data migration involve?
As part of our service, we develop a complete data migration plan, to mitigate the risks. A typical process looks a little like this:
- Data review: We’ll analyse your existing data, where it’s stored and what it’s used for. This step is necessary to be sure of who uses the data, how it is currently captured (and will be captured moving forwards) and the volume of your data. The volume of data is necessary to ascertain how long your data migration will take.
- Data assessment: Before moving your data from one platform to another, it’s important that the security of the data is analysed. We’ll complete a full audit of your raw data to identify any errors which might cause issues down the line. We’ll also highlight any data that needs cleansing to ensure only data that is relevant is moved to your new system.
- Process review: Reviewing your existing internal processes allows us to identify key areas of improvement which will enhance your data capture post go-live. If your business relies on a lot of manual processes, we’ll identify where automated systems or more sophisticated data entry will come into play and show you where this data will live within your new inventory software.
- Reformatting of data: Some data may be in a position to go into your new system as it is, but some may require formatting. Successful importing of data requires crucial formatting – it may seem tedious, but this will ensure that when you start to use your data, it displays correctly in your system for each intended purpose.
- Data testing: Testing is one of the most critical steps of a data migration so to do this it’s important to use real-life data. This ensures that the data displays as intended, with the right parameters and within the right fields and adapts as intended to your internal processes.
- Data import: Importing data is not as simple as uploading a file, this can be quite a complex process – especially if you have a high volume of data to process. As part of this project, we agree dates for your data import to take place, running numerous tests and audits to check your data has migrated to your new inventory system effectively – and correctly!
Data migration is just one of the many services we provide to help future-proof your system effectively. Want to learn more about how we can help? Get in touch with the team today or for more insights into software solutions and inventory management platforms, check out more of our blogs.