An Energy Utility Company in the Netherlands decided to migrate their custom-made ERP system to a standard ERP system. One of the major challenges appeared to be the migration of all the data and information from the old ERP system to the new ERP system. The ERP implementation partner thought of this as just a plain data migration track and presented standard input templates to migrate data into the new ERP system. This would, however, not meet the business expectations and the new ERP system would be ‘loaded’ with data which is either obsolete, not accurate (enough) or in worst cases wrong. Thus leading to a start of the new ERP system with partly invalid and incomplete data and a non-performing and unusable ERP platform.

The client understood the need to improve the data quality of the data to be loaded into the new ERP system.  

The assignment included to determine what needed to be done to improve the quality of the clients current data so this represents a complete and consistent source of data and information to be migrated into the new ERP system. And how would this data be kept valuable. 

Our Approach 

How did we tackle this? 

Our professionals proposed an approach using our ESF/3 methodology to:

• Include a data quality track to determine the quality of the data of the input data; 
• Define a Data Quality Improvement track to improve the quality and completeness of the data of the old ERP system; 
• Investigate the data (and information) needs of the client so we defined what input data needed to be migrated and not just migrate everything or migrate whatever the ERP implementation partner was used to migrate; 
• Setup a Data Migration process which was transparent and showed for every migration step taken the quantitative information about the input data, the output data and the deviations; 
• Build a Data Migration platform which enabled the client to automate the data migration process so the data migration itself became a repeatable and fully automated process which improved the data quality governance;  
• Introduce a Data Migration governance process to demonstrate that the amount and quality of the input data matches the amount and quality of the migrated data including the accountability of the deviations.  

Our approach resulted in a complete and consistent set of input data and a repeatable and validated migration process which included the validation and accountability of the financial details of the stock, transactions and value of the company before and after the migration. 

As a bonus the Data Migration platform and the Data Migration governance process could be used on a frequent bases after the ERP implementation to determine the Data Quality of the ERP platform. This shows that using ESF/3 the failure of an ERP implementation was prevented because of the lack of attention of the entire surroundings on such a ‘simple’ process as ‘translating-input-data-to-output-data’, also known as Data Migration.