The vendor said the old system is end-of-life. The board approved the move. The implementation partner's project plan has a line called "data migration" that assumes your item master, BOMs and customers are clean and your processes are documented. Then discovery starts, and every week produces a change order, and go-live moves right. Nobody lied. Nobody prepared, either.
We've led master data on an S/4HANA program and fed a division's data into a corporate Oracle on a deadline. The target system has never once been the problem.
Duplicates, orphans, blanks in fields the new system makes mandatory, BOM structures the target doesn't support. The old ERP never enforced any of it. The new one will — at load time, on the partner's clock.
The SOPs describe how it was supposed to run in 2009. The real process is a planner's spreadsheet and a controller's memory. Nobody defined the future state, so the partner configured the software to their template and called it best practice.
The vendor, the reseller, the implementation partner. None of them are paid to tell you the data isn't ready, that a module doesn't fit, or that you might not need to move at all. An independent read is the only one that can say so.
Readiness work done first, independent of the vendor, through the Transformation module — in weeks, with the evidence attached.
Every table, customization, spreadsheet and Access database carrying real data; how the process actually runs, from the people who run it. Graded by evidence, and measured against what the target system will require.
Master data merged, resolved and enriched with your people approving decisions. Missing target-required attributes collected through tailored questionnaires. Field-level mapping proven with reconciled test loads.
How each process should run on the target, by role, with the delta from today made explicit. SOPs rewritten, retired or written new. Measurement contracts for how each process should perform after go-live.
Role-based training built from the future state, before go-live. The partner receives clean, mapped, documented data and a defined process. Clairvient keeps reporting running across both systems through cutover.
A divestiture put a manufacturing division's Fourth Shift data on a hard deadline to land cleanly in the parent company's Oracle: AP invoices, supplier masters, GL extracts, a corporate integration template with dozens of required fields, and finance teams on both sides who needed the trial balances to tie. We built and iterated the extract suite against the template, tightened invoice selection to eliminate duplicate-payment exposure, and when period batches disagreed, reconciled to root cause and published the explanation with query-level proof. The migration workstream delivered on schedule against corporate review cycles, with a discrepancy log the client could read.
At a $200M medical device manufacturer, our principal was master data lead on the S/4HANA program and owned the PLM-to-SAP integration — with the plant running at double forecast and no room for a load that didn't tie. Clean data going in was the difference between a cutover and a crisis.
And an honest word about the state of the item master. If you haven't chosen the target yet, say so — that's the best time to start.
You'll get a straight answer and a tight scope. If we can't help, we'll tell you that too — and usually who can.
