Enterprise resource planning
Data migration is the process of moving, copying, and restructuring data from an existing system to the ERP system. Migration is critical to implementation success and requires significant planning. Unfortunately, since migration is one of the final activities before the production phase, it often receives insufficient attention. The following steps can structure migration planning:Often, data migration is incomplete because some of the data in the existing system is either incompatible or not needed in the new system. As such, the existing system may need to be kept as an archived database to refer back to once the new ERP system is in place.
Data conversion
The objective of data conversion is to maintain all of the data, and as much of the embedded information as possible. This can only be done if the target format supports the same features and data structures present in the source file. Conversion of a word processing document to a plain text file necessarily involves loss of formatting information, because plain text format does not support word processing constructs such as marking a word as boldface. For this reason, conversion from one format to another which does not support a feature which is important to the user is rarely carried out, though it may be necessary for interoperability, e.g. converting a file from one version of Microsoft Word to an earlier version to enable transfer and use by other users who do not have the same later version of Word installed on their computer.