Cloud-based CRM platforms for businesses have proved to be one of Dynamics’ most awaited systems. Many businesses that do not currently use a cloud-based CRM system are planning to do so in light of these recent changes in CRM.
Do you count among them? Are you also planning to migrate? The process might seem a little complicated, but with proper planning, it may go well. By going through the proper procedures in the appropriate order, you may prevent duplication of effort, costly mistakes, and time-consuming adjustments. Here are five best practices to help curate a smooth Dynamics migration and implementation plan for your business.
1. Clean up data
Consider this a chance for your company to sort through data from the different places it is stored, such as Excel, current CRM programs, and Access, before switching to the new system. As this data is much important to the company because it assists in boosting sales. A CRM-based platform will make it easy for you to store all these documents and records but migrating from one platform to another has to be done swiftly and calmly.
However, to free up more storage, you need to delete or reassign duplicate records. This will ensure data integrity and will also prevent costs associated with post-migration inconsistencies.
In other words, cleaning up your data storage enables a data reset for your new CRM. Additionally, it saves the migration process a lot of time and effort needed to transfer duplicate or unnecessary records to the new system. Although this process will take some time, a comprehensive data cleansing is worthwhile.
2. Identify Data Storage Capacity
First of all, you need to know your storage requirement. Once you are done with the cleaning part for your company’s data and storage, you need to figure out which data you need in the future and should be migrated along to your new CRM. Determine precisely which data will be transferred to the new system after cleaning up your organization’s current data pool.
Further, you need to define the storage scope required for a successful migration. One of the biggest obstacles businesses often face when implementing CRM is a lack of storage capacity.
Most of the time the implementation process is interrupted because of storage issues. Long-term cost savings for enterprises come from calculating necessary bandwidth prior to migration. A more constrained scope results in fewer data, less CRM storage, and lower expenses.
3. Map Data from Source to Destination
If you are actually concerned about the data migration while implementing a new CRM, you should start by determining how the fields that you are migrating to will appear after migration and which origin fields correspond to which destination fields.
You should start by examining the information in legacy fields to find any that are rarely used. Sometimes, the data migration from these fields might not be necessary if they are not required by the new system.
Furthermore, for mapping and migrating your data in a well-curated manner, get the sheet that maps fields to fields from one location to another by following simple steps. Keep in mind:
- What source field corresponds to which destination field?
- What is the list of the source fields that the destination has stopped requiring?
- What fields can be retired but cannot be migrated?
4. Migrate Smarter, not Harder
While adapting to a new CRM if your businesses adopt a few crucial wise practices, migration can go more smoothly. You can see wonderful results as a result and enjoy the emigration process. You should start by documenting any modifications to the current workflows first.
Then, before the transfer, you should make a backup of the original servers in case any important data is lost. You need to work for the data which is important for your company. To preserve hierarchy and get rid of redundant data that evades scrutiny, mirror the CRM data architecture.
5. Quality Check Before Launch
Enlist end users’ assistance to test the migration prior to launch. You need to verify workflow functionality with proper care. In addition to that, you also need to verify and check that on-premises and cloud fields match, and look for the missing data if any.
Business owners can also check if the migration satisfies system requirements during this pilot test in the user acceptance testing environment and identify any mistakes or inaccuracies before the go-live date.
Apart from the steps above, you can also ask business users to examine and test the data, in addition to validating it and comparing the counts of the source and target data. Users are very well aware of the data. That is why data testing should be done using recognized testing scripts rather than just “eyeballing” the data and assuming it is correct.
Finally, it is advised to run business scenarios and smoke tests against the system before signing off on the Dynamics 365 data migration testing and starting with your implementation process.
Author’s Bio:
Shawn Sauve, the Vice President and Global Dynamics Practice Lead at DynamicsSmartz – Microsoft Gold ERP and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Partner – is the writer for this article.
