Andrew Karasev

Dynamics AX Data Conversion Pitfalls and how to avoid them

Data export from legacy accounting database, cleansing and importing to your new Corporate ERP system should be planned.  It is not recommended just to give an order to your consulting team “convert everything”.

We recommend first to categorize your data and decide which specific objects to bring over in each category.  Also recommended option is to keep your legacy accounting system running for inquiries only.  Leaving old system alive raises the question – do we really need high scale migration project at all?  If you can answer positively or even partially positively on that question – you should be able to save a lot of consulting hour related money and reduce the potential of data import project to fell or stall.  Let’s review migration project planning, conducting and recovery in some details:

1. Master records, open and historical transactions.  Master records are typically required for being imported.  These are GL accounts, customers, employees, vendors, addresses, inventory items.  Launching new accounting application is a good opportunity to think through General Ledger account segments and maybe redesign Chart of Accounts.  But regarding historical transactions – these are potentially optional.  Again, think about leaving your old accounting running for data lookup for several years – and historical transactions migration could be seen as “good-to-have”, but not critical

2. Historical documents import challenge.  Popular migration tool is Excel Import.  What you need to do is fill up Excel templates and then import them into Axapta.  However Excel Import is recommended for the volumes up to ten thousand lines.  If you are converting to AX chances are high that your legacy ERP was in production for ten or more years and the number of historical documents might be counted in millions.  If this is your case, try to limit the number of historical years to migrate to maybe just last year or two.  If you have to import all the history with millions of documents Excel Import might not be the right tool.  Consider instead SSIS (Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services).  Excel Import is reasonably stable and it validates business logic, so you do not compromise data integrity.  Other tools require more homework and accuracy in integration settings.  Think about the fact that each accounting system is unique and has its own table structure, each table differs in its fields name convention.  It might be challenging to map fields and tables from the old application to the new one.  In our practice we realized that historical data import is one of the most popular causes for ERP implementation project to fail or go into limbo phase

3. Data Migration Project Recovery.  From time to time we hear sad stories where unhappy customer decides to change consulting firm due to the fact that historical data import failed.  First of all we would like to say that not every reseller carries technical consultants and programmers to be able to help you with massive data export, massage and migration to Dynamics AX.  Even if they are familiar with such tools as Excel Import – data export from legacy database might be something where they are having hard time.  Popular migration path is from old versions of Great Plains Dynamics on Pervasive SQL 2000/Btrieve and Great Plains for DOS, plus QuickBooks.  Great Plains for DOS is based in Btrieve and its table structure is challenging to connect, as the same file typically hosts several tables and you have to weed out alien records in Pervasive SQL Control Center select statements.  Regarding QuickBooks – here you have to deal with reports printed into text files, as database platform is proprietary.  You potential consultant should have experience in importing text reports into custom SQL table, and cleansing records in sophisticated SQL View

4. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese. Our core expertise is in International Business

Article Tags: Migration Project, Data Import, Excel Import, Great Plains

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