Issues and Challenges When Migrating from ERP system or CRM system to another ERP system or CRM system
Systems covered in this blog:
SAP ERP system: ECC 4.7, ECC 6.0
Oracle ERP system: Oracle ebiz platform
SAP CRM system:
Oracle’s CRM system: Siebel on premise, Siebel on demand (maintained and hosted by Oracle)
In today’s competitive global marketplace, Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP system) and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM system) vendors are offering attractive incentives to companies moving from competitor ERP systems and CRM systems to theirs. Faced with the challenge of re-licensing and re-implementation from a old version of a CRM system or ERP system to the latest versions, a significant number of companies show interest to move to a competitors ERP system or CRM system to obtain better deals on licensing fees and incentives.
SAP and Oracle are the two major software giants in the Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP System) and Customer Relationship Management system (CRM System) solutions with a combine market share of over 50%.
The three areas that should be considered before making this decision are;
Business processes and functionality mapping – How well are the business processes understood and how these processes map to ERP system or the CRM System.
Frequency of change: How frequently does the business processes change that in turn require config changes require customizations to the ERP system or CRM system? For example, Siebel CRM system can be configured and extended as required while changes to Siebel on Demand CRM system (maintained and hosted by Oracle) may take up to a year if ever.
Data Migration: this article will discuss the data migration issues & challenges facing a company considering a move from one ERP system to another. For example from SAP’s ECC system to Oracle E-Business application suite (Oracle’s ERP system).
Data migration key challenges include:
• Identifying and analyzing source data for the ERP system or CRM system
• Accessing heterogeneous data sources for migration to the new ERP system or CRM system
• Addressing and maintaining enterprise data quality required for the new System
• Converting and transforming data for import into the new erp system or CRM system
• Supporting an iterative and ongoing data migration life cycle
Data Migration Technical Challenges
Nomenclature and data structures
SAP uses the Business Partner for its ERP system while Oracle’s eBis suite calls it the Party model. While the concept is the same, the data structures for the same objects are very very different between SAP and Oracle. This is just one object scenario with challenges to data migration approach and architecture.
Point being that every ERP system and CRM system platform has a unique nomenclature and accompanying data structure for each data Object. To complicate this even further the data structure usually changes from version to version. This requires a strong understanding of the business and the ERP system or CRM system data model to architect the right solution.
Underlying database
Data migration between SAP and Oracle is complicated in how the underlying database is used buy each ERP system (or CRM system) For the most part SAP utilizes the database as simple storage and does not leverage primary key and foreign key join relationships at the database layer. (The join logic is stored in the application layer) A prime example would be how SAP converts numbers to text; the customer number is 16 characters long and can have leading zeros.
Oracle ERP system on the other hand, mainly due to its roots as a database company, utilizes the efficiencies of the primary key and foreign key relationships at the database platform.
Decision Technologies recently completed data migration, for a semiconductor client, from six legacy ERP systems to Oracle and SAP ERP systems with a two-way integration between both Oracle ERP system and SAP’s ERP system. The semiconductor client is utilizing the Oracle E-Business suite for manufacturing functions and SAP ECC 6.0 erp system for financial accounting.
Decision Technologies key suggestions –
The business functions might have changed drastically from the last implementation, do not solution the system with the configuration existing on the current ERP system.
Perform data assessment at the beginning of the project to estimate the number of critical objects, structural differences, data quality, amount of customization existing in the current ERP system to exactly scope the Data migration efforts.
Validate the business requirements and compare it to the best practices from the new Enterprise Software vendor to avoid costly customization
Create a Change Management program to train and enable understanding of changes for user base. This will facilitate adoption
Communicate early and often to all impacted teams to garner collaboration and help architecting a user-friendly solution
Design & develop an appropriate data conversion architecture to effectively address the requirements of all systems in the Landscape
Determine the multi-language support requirements at the beginning of solution design