It has become increasingly difficult for Implementation Partners to distinguish themselves from their competition as Cloud solutions have eliminated many of the previously available customizations.
System Integrators’ web pages have interchangeable information and buzzwords, forcing individual partners within these firms to find additional ways to distinguish their services from competitors on every unique pursuit. Clients continually struggle with data. Premier’s Implementation Partners find including a proven, predictable, repeatable, and highly automated data migration process as part of the implementation can differentiate them.
On Cloud implementations, the struggle with data is amplified by the shorter time frame, stricter data quality requirements, lack of environment control, and immature application load programs. Our partners tell us that the increased tensions and staff burnout strains the Client relationship, delays subsequent phases in the roll-out, and decreases the opportunity for future collaboration. Once Implementation Partners see that data does not need to be painful, they bring us in on each engagement because organizations are more than willing to pay for a better overall implementation experience and improved data quality.
In their own words, partners tell us that our services “keep things moving,” “improve the team’s quality of life,” “shorten the length of data conversion,” “make it look easy and fluid,” and “make it so I don’t have to worry about data anymore.”
Concrete, measurable benefits are found in situations where Premier was brought midway into struggling projects. Compared to leaving the data cleansing and transformation activities to the Client, Premier’s services realized the following measured benefits to our Clients and Implementation Partners.
Premier joined an implementation for a Fortune 500 industrial manufacturer that had repeated delays, severe data quality issues, and an incredibly complex legacy data landscape. Throughout the implementation, Premier replaced approximately 30 Client resources with 6 consultants and increased the entire implementation team’s productivity by 50%, bringing them their first successful go-live after a year and a half. The end result was that Premier was able to cleanse, transform, and consolidate 58 legacy applications, across 39 sites, in 17 countries.
After suffering several project delays, the leading manufacturer of US steel was having difficulty scaling their data conversion process to meet project timelines. In order to ensure that the project was to be delivered on time, they brought in Premier to perform the data migration. Premier increased the number of divisions per cycle from 1 to 6 and enabled the time between go-lives be compressed from 6 months to 3 months. Premier’s four consultant team reduced the Client’s data migration team by 7 FTEs and saved thousands of hours across the approximately 100-person project team.
After two failed go-live attempts, Premier was brought in to bring consistency and predictability on a project for a Fortune 500 auto parts manufacturer. Premier reduced conversion test cycle time by 1-week (40%), improved the overall data quality, and ensured that the third go-live attempt was a success.
The Bottom Line
These results are achieved through a combination of specialized consultants, data approach, and proprietary software through the following activities:
- Ensuring the business requirements and transformation documentation is properly created and maintained
- Converting data early in the project, allowing the Client to see real-world data in the new solution
- Defining and managing a data quality strategy that focuses the Client on making business decisions and not updating thousands of records in legacy data
- Delivering on the 5 C’s of data migration - Clean, Consistent, Configured, Complete, and Correct
- Implementing and managing frequent and numerous conversion specification changes that occur throughout the project
“ Data is always an issue, but Premier makes it so I don’t have to worry data about anymore, so I bring them in every time.” – Partner, Big 4 consulting firm
The Applaud® Advantage
To help overcome the expected data migration challenges, the organization engaged Premier International’s Applaud® data migration services. Three key components of Premier International’s Applaud solution helped the client navigate their data migration:
- Premier’s data migration consultants: Premier’s services group averages more than six years of experience working with Applaud, exclusively on data migration projects.
- Premier’s methodology: Premier’s EPACTL approach to data migration projects is different than traditional ETL approaches and helps ensure the project stays on track. This methodology decreases overall implementation time and reduces the risk of the migration.
- Premier’s data migration software, Applaud®: Applaud has been optimized to address the challenges that occur on data migration projects, allowing the team to accomplish all data needs using one integrated product.
