Data Migration is one of the key and complex areas in a SAP implementation project. Some of the implementation fails only due to lack of proper data migration strategy in place. If we are going to implement SAP by replacing the source (e.g Legacy) system the objective of data migration is to load the relevant business data currently residing in the source system into the appropriate SAP modules. This data loaded into SAP system needs to be validated with the source data.
So the Data Migration process includes:
- Extraction of data from the source system
- Transformation of the data to SAP format
- Loading of data into the corresponding SAP module
Steps to be followed:
We need to first identify which are the objects we are going to migrate like Contracts, Assets, Business Partner etc and we need to finalize the solution architecture, whether we will be using any intermediate staging environment or not and whether to use an ETL tool for that or not. Also we need to finalize the strategy and approach/ techniques for data loading of each object (whether to use BAPI/IDoc/Batch Input/Direct Input).
The steps to be followed are:·
- Identification of Source data: Source Data Dictionary
- Identification of Target data requirement: Target Data Dictionary
- Finalizing the technique of data loading
- Mapping of source to target: Mapping document with gaps
- Resolution of data gaps: By applying business rules
- Preparation of test plan and data: To be used for unit testing
- Finalizing Validation and reconciliation strategy: Before uploading the data the data (count, sum of some specific field) should be checked against some control file (reconciliation) and after uploading the data the data loaded into SAP tables should be validated against the source file
- Development: Data conversion program
- Developing the validation and reconciliation report
- Integration Testing: Check for the completeness of the entire data flow
- Volume testing: To check the performance
- Transport into Production
Standard SAP techniques for data transfer:
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/en/2e/9e4638a28b2763e10000009b38f8cf/frameset.htm
