SAP Business One How to Secure Implementation Success

When you are planning to select new Small Business ERP application, be prepared to do your homework. In more than fifteen years consulting career we've seen successes and failures and we would like to share with you our opinion on the best way to avoid failure and secure implementation success. Let's begin with functionality match to your business requirements. Good recommendation is to stick to native functionality of the application with possible several exceptions where you cover lacking functionality with customization. Try to be neutral and avoid possible sympathies and antipathies and look at the functionality match. Review major ERP brands and pick the one with maximum functionality coverage. When you are done with selection let's now take a look at implementation phases and their potential problems:

1. Data Conversion. This phase is famous to cause high percent of project failures. When you are moving data from legacy accounting to new system think about what has to happen. First of all you are exporting data from legacy table and then do so-called data cleansing trying to weed out whatever is not relevant and reshuffle table record fields to fit new format. And then you physically move documents to SAP B1. Native migration tool is Data Transfer Workbench which works with CSV files. Think about conversion levels where probably the required one would be master records, such as business partners, General Ledger accounts and addresses. Again these are likely required candidates to be exported, cleansed and imported. Now let's think about historical documents. Here you have the potential to drive into swamp and eat up your implementation budget. First of all the magnitude of historical documents might be measured in millions and each one should be passed through business logic in order to be saved with all the chores of summary tables update as well as GL distributions. Do not expect historical documents migration to be done right the first time and be ready to restore company database from backup and start over with corrections. We have the following suggestion. Isn't easier to keep legacy accounting running for inquiries only in case if historical customer calls and asks about document status?