What Is NetSuite Data Migration? Benefits, Steps, and Tips

Your IT management team is excited about transitioning from legacy systems to NetSuite ERP, and for good reason. 

This shift addresses many critical needs of your organization: scaling operations, breaking down data silos, reducing maintenance costs, and meeting regulatory guidelines. With NetSuite, you can also unify data across teams and improve operational efficiency.

But, there is one key factor on which depends the success of this transformation: data migration from legacy systems to NetSuite. Without a well-planned NetSuite data migration strategy, these benefits will remain out of reach. That’s why organizations rely on NetSuite consulting services to plan and execute the data migration process for a seamless transition. 

Accurately migrating business data to NetSuite is crucial for the success of your cloud ERP transformation. When done well, it simplifies operations, enhances automation, and provides real-time insights to support informed decision-making. On the other hand, a poorly executed data migration can prevent your organization from fully realizing NetSuite ERP's potential.

Why is NetSuite data migration important?

NetSuite data migration helps you consolidate data and gain actionable insights for strategic planning.

Data silos occur when departments store data in isolated systems for specific functions like customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, or inventory management. This lack of integration restricts an organization’s visibility into the data. With NetSuite, migrating data brings all your business data into a single, unified platform. 

Consolidating financial records, customer details, inventory levels, and operational metrics eases how you monitor performance across departments. NetSuite’s built-in analytics enables you to create forecasts through predictive analytics and scenario planning. You can also use NetSuite’s reporting tools to simplify audit processes and regulatory compliance.

Benefits of NetSuite data migration

Migrating data to NetSuite offers many advantages, including:

• Improved data accuracy: The data migration process improves data quality by cleansing and standardizing data. Accurate data improves the quality of your reporting and analytics, delivering reliable business intelligence insights.
• Scalability: A seamless data migration eliminates data silos and reduces manual effort. This efficiency allows you to adapt to evolving business needs, like expanding into new markets or integrating additional business units.
• Regulatory compliance: NetSuite provides comprehensive tools for data security, audit trails, and reporting. These systems help you accurately transfer data and meet data governance standards and industry regulations. 

Migrating data to NetSuite has challenges, but knowing what to expect helps you plan and tackle them with the right strategy.

NetSuite data migration challenges

While migrating to NetSuite delivers immense value, it does come with challenges. Here are some of them:

Data redundancy and mapping

Duplicate records across various departments result in inconsistencies. For example, sales and accounting departments may store customer information differently. Your data migration team must spot and reconcile these discrepancies to ensure data consistency. 

A well-defined data mapping strategy ensures information flows seamlessly from legacy systems to NetSuite. 

High data migration costs

Data cleaning, restructuring, and extraction can be costly, with migration expenses often adding up to 15% of the new system cost. These costs vary based on the volume and quality of data you migrate. 

To manage this effectively, organizations must prioritize budgeting and resource allocation to manage data migration costs.

Downtime

Data migration requires temporary halting of operations to transfer and validate data from legacy systems. This downtime can be costly, as employees can’t perform regular tasks without essential tools.

The good news? You can tackle these challenges head-on with the right NetSuite data migration strategy.

Steps to build a NetSuite data migration strategy

Organizations must plan meticulously and assess process requirements before moving data to the NetSuite ERP system. While this planning may seem less exciting than actual ERP implementation and go-live, it’s important for a successful data migration.

Source: Medium

1. Understand the data migration process

Start by looking at all your current systems holding essential data like customer details, inventory lists, operational details, and financial transactions. Pinpointing these data sources can help map them to the correct fields in NetSuite ERP. 

2. Create a data migration team

Your data migration team is typically part of your ERP implementation team and includes sales, finance, and operations representatives. These members offer valuable insights into how their departments use data, helping you identify data you need to transfer and how to clean it up. Your IT team is vital in ensuring data integrity and system compatibility. 

Collaborating with NetSuite consultants can help your team clearly understand your existing systems and NetSuite’s complexities, ensuring a smoother migration.

3. Clean and refine data

Sourcing clean data is critical, as poor data will result in an ineffective ERP system – emphasizing the principle of ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ Before migration, you must identify and fix data errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies using data validation tools, manual cleaning efforts, or data enrichment services. 

Format your data properly by aligning currencies, date formats, and field mappings with NetSuite’s preferred language. This ensures your data fits the system’s specifications and provides a smooth integration.

4. Choose the right NetSuite migration method

Evaluate all data migration methods available and choose the approach that best suits your needs. Common methods include:

• Direct imports using CSV files or Connector SuiteApp are ideal for specific, small-scale migration tasks.
• Extract and load involves extracting data from other ERP systems and loading it into NetSuite. While this method is straightforward, it doesn’t allow data validation during migration.
• Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is another approach that allows you to convert data either in-stream or after temporarily storing it. This method lets you manipulate or clean data before moving it to NetSuite.
• Integrated platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions offer a cloud-based centralized console for managing all data. It’s ideal for handling challenges that usually occur during NetSuite data migration.

5. Migrate and validate data

After selecting your migration method, it’s time to move on to the actual data migration process.

• Data extraction involves extracting data from existing systems. For example, if you’re migrating data from a CRM system, you might collect data points like customer profiles, sales history, and interaction logs.

• Data transformation requires you to clean data, fix inconsistencies, and map source fields to NetSuite’s format. For example, you can break down customer addresses into separate fields like street, city, and zip code to meet NetSuite's specific requirements.

• Data validation and testing involves checking data for accuracy before going live. Consider conducting trial runs with smaller data subsets to ensure the data transfer to NetSuite is accurate and error-free.

• Go-live marks the execution of data migration tasks while safeguarding business continuity, data accuracy, and system reliability. Consider migrating data during low-activity periods to minimize the impact on business operations. 
• Post-migration activities let you monitor data quality and address discrepancies quickly. 

Migrating data is a vital part of implementing an ERP system, and it can impact the project's success and overall costs. Knowing what drives data migration expenses helps you set a realistic budget and allocate resources.

NetSuite data migration best practices and tips

Keeping your ERP project on track isn’t easy. Consider following these best practices to avoid the common data migration pitfalls. 

1. Assess the data landscape 

Before starting the data migration process, analyze your existing data, the systems where it’s stored, and its overall quality. Consider how the new ERP system will use this data, how to map it to the ERP’s database structure, and how to establish data translation rules for migration. 

Thorough data analysis upfront helps you understand the scope and complexity of the migration project, setting the stage for a smoother transition.

2. Create a comprehensive plan

Develop a detailed plan with clear objectives, scope, timeline, and resource allocation. This plan ensures your migration activities align with business goals and helps you anticipate challenges. 

Establish a communication strategy to inform and engage stakeholders like management, the IT team, end users, and external partners throughout the process.

3. Build a team

Create a data migration team with representatives from various departments to ensure everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and contributions. To simplify the process, effectively delegate tasks among your internal team, data migration partner, and any third-party consultants. 

Finally, carefully review your implementation partner’s statement of work to define their responsibilities and avoid misunderstandings.

4. Establish data mapping rules

Data mapping connects data fields from your current system to the new ERP system. Develop a thorough data mapping plan to outline how you’ll transform and integrate each piece of data into the new system. Consider adding clear transformation rules to standardize, cleanse, or reformat data. 

5. Conduct test migrations

Running test migrations with sample data allows you to identify and fix potential issues before the full migration. It allows you to validate data accuracy and integrity in the new system. 

6. Implement data security measures 

Consider using encryption and secure transfer protocols to keep data safe during migration. Also, create full data backups before migrating, especially when transitioning from on-premise systems. This protects your data from potential loss or corruption.

7. Create a detailed go-live plan

Plan the go-live stage along with steps like final data migration, system testing, and validation. Assign clear roles to address issues quickly and ensure coordination among teams.  After go-live, have a team ready to handle user queries and fix problems. 

8. Offer training and support 

Train your team thoroughly on how to use the new ERP system effectively. Make sure they understand its features, workflows, and data access procedures. Consider providing ongoing support during the transition to address any questions or issues. 

Data migration isn’t a one-and-done process. After the migration, monitor data and system performance to catch and fix issues quickly. In addition to regularly updating, backing up, and validating data, set up regular maintenance schedules to stay on top of potential issues. 

How NetSuite consulting services help with data migration 

Working with NetSuite consulting services helps you with strategic planning, comprehensive data cleansing, and data transformation.

Strategic planning

NetSuite consulting services offer strategic planning for the migration process. They help define objectives, scope, timelines, and resource needs. 

Consultants also create detailed migration plans that align with your business goals and address potential challenges. They establish clear roles, set responsibilities, and strong communication channels to ensure a smooth transition to NetSuite.

Data cleansing 

NetSuite consultants carefully analyze existing data to spot and fix inconsistencies, duplicates, and errors. They apply various data cleansing methods to ensure you migrate only high-quality data. After migration, they validate the data to confirm its integrity and accuracy in NetSuite. 

Data transformation

NetSuite consultants are experts at aligning data fields from legacy systems to NetSuite's structure. They carefully create a data mapping plan that outlines how to transform and integrate data into the new system. This process includes setting data transformation rules to clean, format, and convert data, which ensures data accuracy within the NetSuite environment.

Ready to move data?

Switching to NetSuite is a smart move for businesses looking to retire their old legacy systems. Those outdated systems can’t keep up with the flexibility, integration, and real-time insights you need. Migrating data to NetSuite lets you combine all data in a cloud-based platform. 

Plus, you can improve efficiency and drive business growth by simplifying operations and automating repetitive tasks. Consider teaming up with a NetSuite consulting service to avoid migration headaches and maximize your investment.

Thinking of how to keep data secure? Check out the best data security software to minimize the risk of data loss and improve user governance. 

Edited by Monishka Agrawal