More than 80% of the data migration initiatives go over budget or don’t succeed as planned. Although data migration is a technical task, for it to be effective, there are a few things you need to keep in mind, such as ensuring data integrity and minimal disruption.
Platforms such as Oracle Fusion Applications operate on a foundational element, that is, effective data migration. This ensures that the platform works on accurate and relevant data, which increases your business’ agility and operational efficiency.
Defining Your Migration Scope & Strategy
Before moving your data to a new system, you need to have a clear scope and an enterprise data migration strategy. You have to take a few important decisions:
- Master vs. Historical Data: Determine what kind of data is required immediately. You can archive the historical data or migrate it later, in the next phase.
- Phased vs. Big-Bang: Decide if you want to migrate the data in stages, which has lower risk but takes longer duration, or you want to migrate all the data at once, facing higher risk but takes place faster.
- Scope Control: Define what data will be migrated, from which sources, and to which specific modules within the Oracle Fusion application so that you can stay within the scope.
What are the Key Components in Oracle Fusion Data Migration?
These components are the foundation of an effective data migration strategy:
Governance & Data Ownership
In order to migrate the data effectively, you need to have proper governance in place to guide your organization with the technical processes:
- Establish Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Define who owns the data in the current system, who will be responsible for the quality of the data, and who will be the data steward in the new Oracle Fusion environment.
- Data Lineage Mapping: Make note of the entire lifecycle of the data. Understand how it came into existence, what changes it went through, and how it reached its destination. This will help you later while troubleshooting any issues that occur.
- Compliance Oversight: Get the legal teams onboard in the beginning itself to ensure the data that is being migrated adheres to the relevant regulations, such as GDPR and HIPAA.
Profiling, Cleansing & ML-Assisted Quality
Garbage in, garbage out is quite common during data migration and you might want to avoid that. Maintaining the quality of the data is a continuous process that is enhanced by modern techniques:
- Comprehensive Data Profiling: Analyze the source data to understand if it is of a good quality, as in, it is accurate and consistent. You should identify the issues before migration so that you don’t carry it over and complicate the new system.
- Targeted Data Cleansing: Follow a few rules to improve the quality of the data. Correct the errors, remove the duplicates, and fill the missing values. In short, make sure to clean the data.
- ML-Assisted Quality: Take the help of Machine Learning (ML) systems to point out patterns that indicate the data is not of a good quality. ML can help you in fuzzy matching and suggesting corrections that improve the way the overall data is governed.
Tooling & Automation Overview
You need the right tools to conduct a successful Oracle Cloud data migration:
- Oracle Tools: Oracle provides several native tools that you can use for various functions. For example, FAL, FBDI, ADFdi, and APIs.
- Third-Party Platforms: There are many third party tools that help in making data migration easier. They can enhance the automation abilities and handle errors in complex scenarios.
- Custom Scripts: Some transformations or integrations require custom scripts and you need to make sure that these are developed properly.
Mapping & Cloud-Native Transformation
This is where the source data is transferred to the Oracle Fusion environment:
- Schema Alignment: This is a technical process where the source data fields are mapped with the schemas in Oracle Fusion. It requires an understanding of the new data models and formats.
- Cloud Performance Tuning: Tune your processes such that they can benefit from Oracle Cloud’s capabilities and perform better.
Validation, Reconciliation & Cutover Planning
Data migration is considered complete once it is thoroughly validated:
- Multi-Phase Testing: Ensure the data is accurate and can be used in the new system for which you should conduct unit testing, integration testing, and UAT.
- Reconciliation Dashboards: Make use of dashboards where you can compare the volume of data and the necessary metrics between the current and new system.
- Rollback Triggers: You need to have procedures which you can refer to in case you need to roll back the migration so that you can minimize the impact it could have on the business.
- SLA Checks: Check and ensure that the system to which the data is migrated meets the SLAs in terms of performance.
Training, Change Management & Adoption
You can consider the Oracle Fusion implementation to be successful when the new technology is accepted by the employees. There are a few areas that require focus:
- Role-Based Training: Provide training to your staff on how to use Oracle Fusion for their specific tasks as the processes will be quite different from what they are used to.
- Stakeholder Engagement Strategy: Communicate with all the stakeholders and address any concerns they may have. Show them how the new system will benefit the business.
- Continuous Adoption Support: Provide continuous support to your staff and make the necessary resources available as this will help them adapt to the new system and its features completely.
Post-Migration ROI & Operational Metrics
Even if the data migration is done, it is successful if it impacts the business positively:
- TCO vs. Realized Benefits: The migration costs should be considered, but in addition to it, you need to also analyze the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new Oracle Fusion environment.
- Cost Savings & KPI Dashboards: Migrating to a new system will have benefits such as reducing the maintenance required and increasing the efficiency of the processes, which reduces your costs. You need to track these savings in addition to KPIs to demonstrate the ROI.
Conclusion
Oracle Fusion data migration may be a complex process, but it is very beneficial to businesses once it is implemented properly. You not only need to transfer the data to a new system but also ensure that it brings in better ROI.
Ready to ensure successful data migration? Contact us today to discuss an Oracle Cloud data migration pilot.
FAQs
What are the specific challenges when migrating data from old legacy systems to Oracle Fusion?
This process usually faces challenges such as inconsistent data formats and undocumented data definitions. It requires you to conduct extensive profiling and create custom extraction scripts.
What best practices should be followed for historical data that is not migrated to Oracle Fusion?
You should archive this data in a cost-effective and secure cloud storage solution. This data should be in a standard form and have meta data that can be retrieved in the future.
How does Oracle Fusion Cloud comply with regulations during and after the migration?
Oracle Fusion Cloud has multiple global data centers and cloud regions, so organizations can choose the specific location where they want to store their data and meet the regulations of that location.
