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With benefits like a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and increased flexibility to respond to changing business needs, many organizations are adopting cloud and hybrid ERPs. A crucial part of preparing for this change is evaluating and cleaning legacy data so that you move only high-quality, error-free data to your new system.
Of course, data migration from any system to another can be a challenge, and organizations often underestimate the amount of time required for data preparation, cleansing, and validation. While the data hygiene process can involve risk, using the right tools will provide more accurate, actionable, and impactful business insights, which makes it worth the effort and investment.
The value of an ERP system depends on the quality of its data; organizations cannot optimize business decisions and operations using inaccurate or unreliable information. That’s why improving the state of data should be a key focus as organizations prepare to move to the cloud. When your systems operate using clean data, you can realize increased business efficiency, build stronger customer relationships, and achieve higher employee satisfaction.
Accuracy and consistency are both crucial to having clean data. Data usefulness is another aspect to consider when preparing for a migration. To decrease costs and minimize the volume of migrated data, you should identify and leave behind all redundant, outdated, and trivial (ROT) data. Then, archive data you wish to save but do not want to transfer to your new system.
Beyond cleaning data before a move, organizations switching to Oracle ERP Cloud need to determine how they’ll continue to assess, clean, and validate data moving forward. In general, Oracle tools are made for mass data migration but not for everyday use, and Oracle’s built-in data loading solutions make it difficult to maintain data hygiene. A complicated interface hinders efficiency on daily tasks and users are unable to customize or reuse templates that would simplify their work. Users interacting with data can also easily introduce errors into your ERP system. To combat these issues, you’ll need to find tools and processes that support your everyday workflows and help to ensure your data stays clean and reliable.
Without the right software, identifying and addressing data issues can be extremely tedious, with significant room for error and oversight. Users who do not have the right tools to check and validate their work can accidentally introduce new mistakes into the system during the data cleansing process. Whatever the cause, each data inaccuracy and inconsistency in your system increases business risk and misinformation.
Some organizations turn to custom development for their data cleaning. This option requires significant effort and time from team members for development and testing, with solution quality not proven or guaranteed. In our experience, rarely does custom development provide an adequate immediate or long-term solution. Likewise, free data cleaning tools frequently fall short of the features and functionality needed to work with your systems for efficient and effective data cleansing and maintenance.
Utilizing a proven and trusted solution like More4apps software can expedite data cleansing. With More4apps, organizations can easily check the validity of their data and ensure that it conforms to defined business rules and constraints. Secondly—and perhaps most importantly—the accuracy and completeness of data can be defined. Oftentimes, it is here that companies find missing or inaccurate data within their ERP that needs to be addressed.
While data cleanup may sound daunting, using an out-of-the-box software solution, like More4apps, will streamline and automate the process, saving both time and money. In addition to helping identify and fix inaccuracies and missing, inconsistent, or duplicate data, More4apps can be used after a data cleaning to verify that all known issues have been mitigated and no new errors were introduced.
More4apps software integrates easily with your tech stack and processes so that it can be part of your ongoing journey of managing clean data while staying upgrade proof with Oracle ERP Cloud quarterly releases. With an intuitive Excel-based user interface and templates tailored to your use case, More4apps is simple to use and learn, allowing you to quickly import and export data from your ERP system. To reduce risk, data validation always occurs before data is added to Oracle.
