Data migration
Data migration is moving existing records — customers, products, stock, open orders, balances — out of the systems and spreadsheets holding them today and into a new system, in a state the new system can actually use.
Also written: data conversionArabic: ترحيل البيانات
The step everyone underestimates
Not because moving data is hard. Because every business discovers, at this point, that its records are messier than it believed: duplicate customers, products nobody sells, stock figures that have not matched a count in years. Migration does not create those problems. It is the first time anyone has had to look at all of them at once.
Cleaning is business work
It cannot be delegated to whoever is building the system, because deciding which of three near-identical customer records is real requires knowing the customer. This is the part of a project most likely to slip, and the part least likely to be resourced.
Migrate less than you think
The instinct is to bring everything across "just in case". Ten years of dead records make a new system slower and less trustworthy on day one. Bring what is live, and archive the rest somewhere readable.
Related terms
Questions people ask
The people who use the data check it, against things they already know — a customer's balance, last month's stock on a real shelf. A row count matching proves only that rows moved.
Related serviceERP implementation