ERP migrations fail more often than they succeed, and they almost never fail for technical reasons. They fail because the business changes faster than the project, the data is messier than anyone admitted, and the cutover is treated as an event rather than a process.
Start with the close, not the catalog
Most teams start with the item master. Start with the month-end close instead. Map every report your finance team produces, who reads it, and where the numbers come from.
Three buckets of data
- 1Masters (customers, vendors, items, GL accounts) — clean and migrate fully.
- 2Open balances (AR, AP, inventory, WIP) — reconciled to the rupee at cutover.
- 3History — migrate the last 12–24 months only; keep the rest as read-only archive.
Cutover is a weekend, not a moment
Plan a parallel run for at least one close cycle. Run the old and new systems side-by-side. Reconcile daily. The first variance is the most expensive — find it on day two, not day forty.
A pattern that works
Freeze masters on Friday. Run final close on the old system Saturday. Load openings to the new system Sunday. Go live Monday with the previous Friday's open balances locked.
The teams who treat ERP migration as a financial event — with finance owning the timeline — succeed. The ones who treat it as an IT project tend to slip by quarters.
From IT Artificer
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