The power of data when switching business systems
When switching systems it can be tempting to just start with simple clean data and say "garbage in, garbage out, clean data here we come", but is this the right idea and what is the hidden cost of doing this?
Data is king and switching to a new system is no time to lose this data. How to supercharge your launch into a new system by keeping all your data. It's easier than you think and the benefits are huge.
In the world of business data, the saying "garbage in, garbage out" is all too well-known. However, when considering switching to a new system like Odoo using OLaunch's conversion service, it's important to recognise that not all historical data is created equal. In this blog post, we'll dive into how you can address concerns about potentially messy data during the conversion process and turn this challenge into an opportunity to enhance your business operations.
1. The Value of Historical Data: Before we delve into data cleanup strategies, let's remind ourselves of the immense value historical data brings to your business. A treasure trove of insights, historical data allows you to analyse trends, identify growth opportunities, and make informed decisions based on past performance.
2. Everyone benefits:
- Sales - Discover seasonal insights, top performing customers and products.
- Purchasing - See historical purchasing demand, price changes, and lead times.
- Marketing - Create data-driven marketing campaigns with customer and sales data. Re-marketing, upsells and re-engaging lost customers.
- Inventory - Highest and lowest moving products and changes to margin.
- Accounting - Business KPIs and trends, changes to cash flow and more.
3. Addressing Data Concerns: It's understandable that businesses worry about introducing inaccurate or messy data into a new system. However, it's essential to recognise that the goal of data migration isn't just to replicate data as-is, but to leverage it in a more beneficial way.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
4. The Big Picture: Ultimately, the goal of data migration isn't just to have pristine data from the get-go. It's about harnessing your historical data to drive growth and improve business operations. The initial cleanup process is a stepping stone toward achieving this goal.
5. Examples of your historical data in action
Here are a few examples of ways that having your data ready and accessible in your new system will be invaluable. Unlock your old data and leverage it for business growth.
- Create a marketing campaign to customers who bought X in the last 100 days for an upsell campaign.
- Run an sms campaign to re-engage customers that have bought in the past 18 months, but not in the last 6 months.
- Book site visits with customers in a geographic region that belong to a specific industry.
- Find top customers in the last 12 months for a thank you campaign
- Check a warranty claim to see when the customer purchased a product
- Resolve a payment dispute for a payment 6 months ago
- See changes in average debtor days
- Identity products with the highest return/refund/fault rates
- Identity products with low/high margin
6. Conclusion: Embracing historical data, even when part of it is messy, is a strategic choice that can lead to enhanced decision-making, process optimisation, and improved data governance.
OLaunch's conversion service empowers you to migrate your data seamlessly, and with Odoo's powerful tools, you can transform potentially messy data into a valuable asset. Remember, it's not about perfection from the start; it's about the journey of leveraging data to achieve your business goals.
Talk to us about making the switch to Odoo.
Bring your data and create a foundation for growth and insight.
How to clean your data
Doing a spring clean of your data before converting can give you one less thing to worry about after going live in your new system. How to do this will be very dependent on what system you are using.
After switching to Odoo the Odoo data cleaning app makes it easy to clean up your data after converting to Odoo.
Odoo's deduplicate data app: Create data matching rules to detect duplicate records for your review. Merging a contact or product will combine its sale history.
Review duplicate records and merge or keep. It's that easy.
Odoo's field cleanup app: Create rules to clean up fields on your records. This can remove extra spaces, symbols and other issues in phone numbers, website address and more.
Review and apply suggestions to clean up your data.
Talk to us about making the switch to Odoo.
Bring your data and create a foundation for growth and insight.