Conversion Prep

The single most important ingredient to the success of any enterprise system implementation is the data that will drive the new system. Therefore, the effective conversion of existing data is paramount in any SAP implementation. This is the case with Optimal as well.

As a business completely runs on spreadsheets, this exercise presents several challenges, especially in the areas of data cleanup, organization, and conversion into a common format.

Let’s consider data cleanup first. In this activity, we look at the sources of the data. In some cases there are multiple and sometimes redundant sources of the data. This must be reconciled in the “to-be” process. Then inconsistencies must be rooted out and corrected. This can include record count inconsistencies, spelling, level of detail, etc. To resolve this requires the intervention of those most familiar with the data – end users. Participation in this activity by those users is critical.

For the actual conversion of data into the new system our project team used tools such as WinShuttle and SAP’s LSMW which are data conversion tools that help make the task of data conversion faster and simpler for the team. 

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