This is a blog exploring common issues with data migrations and why, frankly, we are very good at them.
If you just want to see how we help people with data migrations, upgrades and implementations there’s a page for that here.

Otherwise, please read on !

As a proof of concept the project team recreated in Alteryx with Continuum a migration ETL process that had previously been engineered in-house in SQL in 6 man-weeks. 
In Alteryx it was 6 hours of work and with much better visibility. 
Using Alteryx from Continuum we were able to meet our deadlines with our existing project team and without requiring external consultancy.
Continuum have stepped up to the challenge and proved that not only could they provide the global support that TMF needed, they were more flexible, more agile and simply of a much higher standard than the comparators.
Andy Wicks, Project Lead TMF Group migrating State Street AIS Investran instance.

You’ve outgrown your current system, or bought a new company, and you’re investing serious money in core systems to grow your company and become more efficient - great news!

You’ve spent significant time and money with external advisers choosing the right system for your ambitious plans, and now all you need to is get it live.

All the vendors assured you it’s easy, and they’ve migrated loads of clients from your old system, so it should just take a couple of months.

What could go wrong ? Well…

• Your old system data doesn’t fit the new one.
  On closer inspection the vendor admits it’s not quite seamless after all.

• Your vendor is busy and struggles to provide experts to the project.

• Finding resources for the project is hard.

• Historic data issues in your old system surface, Excel work-arounds appear.

• Data migration is time consuming and has to be repeated every time the new system is fixed.

• Reconciliations are manual, time consuming, error prone and more frequent than planned.

• You end up having to maintain the old system and a set of migration spreadsheets.

• Key team members have to spend lots of unanticipated time to get the new system live.

• You have to keep external contractors for many more months than budgeted for.

• The project end date keeps getting pushed back a couple of months at a time, but always “nearly there”.
  One of these will almost certainly be from November to February so as to miss Christmas and Year-End.

• The project misses its Go Live date, meaning that you have to consider renewing your old system licence for another year.

• In the end, just to get it live, you leave historic data in the old system and never quite get round to turning it off.
  Ridiculously expensive “read only” licence costs not in the budget ensue - your old vendor loves you !

• The new system goes live, but less functional than the old one - time to build some more spreadsheets !

• Some people give up and just rekey the data in the new system, but how do you know the outputs match ?

Don’t worry, we have the answer !

We guarantee that your project will go better, we’ll even prove it for free - get in touch !