Outside of cleaning up master data before a project begins, the other thing to keep in mind is cut over. We've done projects where an organization has brought a modest amount of transactional history from the financial and supply manager applications, maybe two or three years. Ahead of the go-live, the downtime needed to handle that amount of conversion is four, five days, maybe even a week in order to just process that convert version. This means the only way to do an FSM go live over a weekend is to start with a clean slate. But what are we going to do about all this data that we still need to look up?
We know that you’ve spent so many years accumulating all this beautiful data and you just want to get rid of it. However, you should keep in mind that there might be regulatory requirements of why you need to have it. Realistically, your AP department and your supply management department need to look back at transactions that have occurred to manage vendor relationships and everything. This means we do need to find a solution for business users to inquire on that legacy data once the go-live is complete. Now is the time to start thinking through what the options are and start planning for what do we want to do there?
Now, this consideration is more urgent for organizations that are doing a big bang go-live or have a reason they need to get out of legacy systems such as being decommissioned. They might have a hosted Lawson system that's going to disappear once they move to CloudSuite, or maybe there are other sort of timeline factors. But for those organizations, I'll give you three options off the top of my head to consider. One option is for holding historical transactional data; here, you would load it up in the cloud, but in untransformed state. Rather than transforming all that data to be active transactions in CloudSuite, Infor offers some venues to bring old Lawson data over in the state that it exists today for inquiry purposes only.
That’s the second option. The third is to put it all up with the rest of your live business data, but hold it to the side before you transform it. Another option would be if you have Lawson or older applications on-premises where the application servers need to be decommissioned, you can do so by leaving the database server up and running in read only state. Then we can use things like reports or ad hoc inquiry screens to get access to business users. We've even had clients that go and run a bunch of reports in Lawson, and then save the output as PDF into a file folder somewhere that business users can reference if needed. It’s all about what works best for your company.
