SAP-migration
An migration to SAP can be carried out for various reasons. For example, you want to migrate your data from another ERP package to SAP, or, when acquiring a company, incorporate your acquisition’s data into your own SAP environment. Other companies work internationally with different SAP instances and want to merge them into one central SAP installation. All different reasons for moving data into or out of SAP.
Such a migration often consists of two parts, namely setting up the SAP environment and migrating the data. cimt can take care of both processes, but also one of these parts. It is especially important that there is sufficient coordination between the party that sets up SAP and the party that migrates the data so that you can be sure that the right data is in the right place.
Our experience shows that not everyone is aware that your existing ETL toolset is ideally suited to carry out this data migration or consolidation. cimt is a partner of Talend and uses this platform for the data migrations it performs to SAP, or to other systems.
cimt has extensive experience with data integration and data migration in combination with SAP and has refined the approach for this and incorporated it into a step-by-step plan:
- Intake: First, we discuss the requirements of your new environment and the architecture of your existing environment. We discuss a rough approach at this stage and decide which departments should be involved in the migration to SAP at what time. We also do a fit-gap analysis to make sure we don’t overlook any data groups.
- Inventory: In this step we dive a little deeper into the data. We look at which fields from the source system need to be mapped to which fields in your new environment. We coordinate this with the users within your company who have knowledge of your existing environment and of the data (Subject Matter Experts). In SAP migrations, all details are important: the better the configuration is known, the more accurate the business rules (mapping/transformation) can be drawn up.
- Development: Once the mappings are made, we develop the ETL processes needed to migrate your data. During this step, we also apply our “cimt framework for monitoring” in order to be able to record in the go-live phase exactly which and how much data we process in each process. This way we can guarantee that all data is migrated.
- Data Quality: A migration is ideally suited to analyzing the quality of your data and improving it where possible, and Talend offers excellent capabilities to facilitate this. Think about customers that appear multiple times or materials that are registered twice. In the ETL processes, we can include steps to automatically recognize duplicates or otherwise potentially inaccurate data and present it to your staff for review. We call this data stewardship. In this way, you can be sure that your new ERP environment will contain data of excellent quality.
- Testing: During process development, the migration processes will be tested and validated. The migration is not yet finalized, but we like to take enough time to verify in a number of iterations that the data is in the right format at the right place. Then we will perform an end-to-end test to make sure that all dependent data has also been migrated.
- Go-live: If you are satisfied with the test results then the migration can be carried out. The existing environment is blocked so that no new changes can be made and the data is transferred to the new SAP environment. During the migration we apply our “cimt framework for monitoring”, recording exactly which and how much data is migrated. This way we are 100% sure that all data is transferred and your financial controllers can easily verify that we haven’t missed anything.
- Post go-live: After the migration of your data, we are not quite finished. cimt is happy to provide aftercare to dot the “i’s” and is happy to answer any questions or ambiguities you may have.
If you are thinking about migrating your data to SAP, we would like to get in contact with you.