What is the data migration process?

Most migrations follow the same stages: scope and discovery, data profiling and cleansing, mapping to the target system, building extract and load routines, repeated trial migrations with reconciliation, and a final cutover with sign off.

What are the biggest data migration challenges?

Poor source data quality, unclear ownership, mappings that miss business rules, too few trial runs, weak reconciliation and a cutover window that leaves no room to recover.

Is there a data migration checklist?

At a minimum: named data owners, agreed scope and history, profiling results, a cleansing plan, signed off mappings, several full trial migrations, reconciliation reports at each stage, cutover and fallback plans, and business sign off criteria.

ERP Data Migration: What Goes Wrong and How to Prevent It

Why data is treated as an afterthought

Data migration sounds like a technical task to be done near the end: extract from the old system, load into the new one. That framing is the root of the problem. Migration is not a technical task, it is a business one, because only the business can say what the data means, which records matter, and whether a migrated record is correct.

What actually goes wrong

The data is worse than anyone admits

Years of workarounds, duplicates, missing fields and local conventions live in the old system. Everyone knows it is imperfect. Almost nobody knows how imperfect until they try to move it, by which point the timeline assumed clean data.

Nobody owns the data

When migration reveals problems, the question is who decides how to fix them, and often the answer is nobody. Data ownership that was never established becomes a bottleneck exactly when speed matters.

It is never trialled at full volume

Programmes report data as on track having loaded a sample. The problems, performance, reconciliation, edge cases, only appear at full volume, and if the first full load happens near go live, there is no time to react.

Reconciliation is an afterthought

Proving that what arrived in the new system matches what left the old one, to the satisfaction of finance and audit, is real work. Left late, it becomes the thing standing between you and a go live nobody can sign off.

How to get it right

Start early and treat it as a business workstream, with business owners, not just technical resources.
Profile the data honestly at the outset, so the plan reflects the real state, not the assumed one.
Assign ownership for each data domain, with someone empowered to make cleansing decisions.
Run multiple full volume trial loads, and make the business reject and re accept migrated records as a dress rehearsal for the real thing.
Build reconciliation in from the start, with rules agreed by finance and audit early, not negotiated at go live.

The test to apply now

If you want to know whether your programme’s data workstream is really on track, ask two questions. How many full volume trial loads are planned, and how many have happened. And has the business formally rejected a set of migrated records yet. If the honest answers are “not enough” and “no”, the data workstream has not truly started, whatever the status report says.

We help programmes get data under control before it becomes the thing that stops go live. See ERP implementation consulting and programme recovery, or get in touch.