Monday, November 17, 2014

Case study: Effective methodology for master data migration in SAP rollout

Business challenge:
The success of a SAP roll-out is dependent on the success of the data preparation, data quality and data upload. The data preparation needs thorough understanding of data from legacy system and the good understanding on the data structure in new system. The mapping rules have to be properly defined so that the data inconsistencies will be avoided.

With huge volume of data from material master, customer master, vendor master along with transaction data from open purchase orders, open sales orders and open production orders the challenge was how effectively and efficiently to migrate these data with high accuracy with the available resources and the agreed time line.

Approach:
Comprehensive and Integrated approach was adopted to migrate the master data and transaction data into SAP system with high data accuracy.
§  Single point of contact in user department: One person should be identified from the user department who will coordinate with other user departments to identify and collect the master data details.

§  Sharing the details of master data views: The rollout team or the data migration team must explain in details about each of the fields in the master data to the user department. This makes good understanding of each fields of master data preparation.

§ Excel templates: The excel templates must have clear details on each of the mandatory fields. The formatting of each field should be checked before uploading. This avoids data formatting errors while uploading. Many times the upload program fails due to missing excel formats.

§  Tools for migration: LSMW programs are used to upload data from legacy system to SAP. These smart programs and validates basic checks while uploading. These programs can be executed either in the background of foreground.

§ Smart way for data verification: Once the data is uploaded the uploaded data must be verified to ensure that the master data is uploaded without any errors. The smart way is to download the data from SAP into an excel file and do a vlookup in excel which eliminates the mistakes or list the mistakes.

Results:
With this effective approach, it ensures that the data accuracy will be high and the transactions happens smooth after Go Live or in other words the high productivity after Go Live.

No comments:

Post a Comment