Data migration & upgrades
Move it, upgrade it or retire it, without losing anything on the way.
A migration is often treated as a mapping exercise: this field goes there. In practice, the old system holds years of exceptions, workarounds and meanings nobody wrote down, and the new system thinks differently about all of them. That is where migrations fail, and that is where we start.
Meanwhile, the business can’t stop. Operations carry on, and the window to switch is often measured in hours.
What we do
- Migrate data from a legacy system to its replacement.
- Upgrade systems to a supported platform, including their data pipelines, reports and applications.
- Carve out, consolidate or retire systems after an acquisition, a divestment or a replacement.
- Keep old and new running side by side, and in step, during the transition.
How we do it
- Understand the old system before moving anything out of it.
- Move only the data that matters, and check it before it is loaded.
- Make every load reversible. There is always a plan B, and usually a C.
- Reconcile every difference between old and new, and explain it.
- Document every decision, so that an auditor has nothing left to ask.
Where to start
A migration doesn’t have to start as a large project. It can start with one system, with a check of the data before a new system goes live, or with a second opinion on a plan someone else has written.
Examples
- An airline’s crew management system migrated while flights kept operating, within a loading window of a few hours.
- A 24/7 toll tunnel migrated to a new transaction system with zero downtime, old and new running in parallel for months.
- Six legacy systems of a utility and telecom company migrated to a single ERP platform.
- Two acquired businesses brought into a global SAP environment.
- Customer data from more than 75 sources consolidated, with every record traceable to its origin.