Reimagining Data Migration: Tackling a large-scale ERP consolidation with user-centred innovation

Data migration - Government client

Our confidential government client’s programme objective was to optimise investment and operations by centralising the management and infrastructure of a vital service. A huge part of the challenge was around the mass data migration required; we designed and built a custom product to facilitate this piece within a tight timeframe.

Background

Over 60 organisations nationwide needed to export, upload, and map data across 5 ERP domains, from at least 1000 distinct source systems. This would enable the data to be imported into a reduced set of target systems, to be run by several new, centralised entities. Additional complexity stemmed from variations in staff technical ability, availability, and limited government specialists to assist manually. We partnered with Section6 (Software development + DevOps) to deliver this innovative approach to data migration and ERP transformation.

No items found.

Moving from a tedious manual process to a self-serve product model created massive efficiencies

‍

Users can quickly filter by mandatory and baseline attributes, and get specific, up-to-date documentation for each attribute quickly.
‍
This visibility has helped increase the number of required attributes organisations actually mapped compared to the previous manual excel workbook.

‍

Data specialist

Design highlights

Data migration tools typically present mapping tasks in the order ‘source to target’. With this layout, users are encouraged to focus on their source data, to try and find a home for all of it. While this may be important in the long run, it may not actually be necessary for Day 1 go live. Encouraging users to do more than needed can jeopardise meeting deadlines.

For the new base systems to become operational on Day 1, organisations only needed to map a subset of their source data to the mandatory target attributes. Post-launch, additional source data could be mapped to optional target attributes with the flexibility of Business as Usual (BAU) time in the new entity.

With our Data Migration tool, we innovatively presented mapping tasks as 'target to source’. This, coupled with being able to filter to show mandatory target attributes only, guided the users to perform their mapping tasks in a prioritised way.

‍

By presenting mapping tasks ‘target to source’, the priority workflow was inherent in the design.

No items found.

In-situ documentation, clear feedback on progress, and clear action requests, enable everyday business users (who may not be technical) to self-serve tasks as much as possible. This freed up expensive data engineers to focus on the most difficult tasks that truly needed them.

MVP in just 5 months

There was no off-the-shelf mapping tool globally that could fit the programme’s needs, especially none with flexibility that allowed for the data standards to evolve along the way.

Existing tools were too rigid and would have required too many hours performing manual tasks and work arounds - the business case favoured building a custom tool.

We expedited the usual timeline of a custom build by working with real users early to understand what really mattered. Our early design prototypes and testing allowed us to fail fast and learn. Total time from early discovery through to design and MVP build (where the mapping feature was available) was just 5 months. All planned major features were live by the 1 year mark.

No items found.

Ghost is by far the easiest partner I work with… Most of the time, partners have a view of how they add value, often by dictating the process, and Ghost have a special ability to give advice and drive, but stay so flexible as well.

Daryl Shing

Chief Architect

No items found.