Hello Readers,
Purpose of this Blog :
Nowadays, SAP is one of the widely used ERP software across the large or medium size enterprises because of its excellent integrated business processes and friendly user experience. You can access your business data and processes easily at one place.
Data Migration is important step in any SAP implementation project. Enterprises plan their migration of data from various NON SAP/Legacy or SAP sources. Hence it is important to understand the data migration process end to end.
What's in it for you?
This blog focuses on explaining the simplified version of migration process considering Extraction, Transformation, Preload Validations, Load and Postload Validations.
Let's get into the process!
Moving the data from one system to another follows a simple ETL process and in addition to this I think it is very much important to put validations also in this process. I will try to explain each part of this below.
Below is the simple flow diagram how the process looks like-
SAP Data Migration Flow Diagram
Each step is explained below -
- Extraction
This step is used to get the most relevant business data for migration to new system, below points are considered during this step.
- In this, we pull the relevant data from source based on criterias provided by business, these criterias are also called as "Relevancy Rules"
- Relevancy rules can be dates, business values filters, plants scope filters etc.
- These conditions vary from object to object and these are used to get the inscope records for a particular object
- The data which satisfies these conditions are generally called as inscope data and will be used as a source data for migration and will be considered for next step
- Generally target tables created within this step follows adding "Relevant " keyword in table names with corresponding object/segment name
- Transformation
This step is most important in data migration and plays very significant role, below points are considered during this step
- Relevant data which was extracted in step 1 will under go various transformations to meet the target system requirements like structural, process setup etc.
- Detailed additional business logics, mappings are applied on inscope data
- source fields are mapped to target fields using different transformation rules like
- Copy - One to one mapping from source to target
- Default- Assignment of default value to a field
- Logical - Condition based rules
- Xref/Cross Reference - Cross reference tables will be used to convert the source value to match with target value etc
- This step will make sure that all field values are aligned with target sap system.
- Generally target tables created within this step follows adding "Map" keyword in table names with corresponding object/segment name
- Preload Validation
This step is performed once you have your transformed data ready and before you attempt to load data, hence called as 'Preload Validations'
- Different validations are performed in this step to ensure data you are loading in the target system pass necessary checks and system requirements/configurations
- Validations which are performed are -
- Mandatory - These are type of validations, which validates if all the system and business mandatory fields are populated or not
- Format - These validations are performed to confirm data formats like date fields, length checks, pattern checks etc.
- Configuration check - These validations are used to check if all the necessary configuration is maintained into the system to load the data like plant codes should be configured in the system to load product master
- There can be more possible set of validations based on business requirements
- Preload validations are applied on transformed data to get Valid set of records and Invalid set of records
- Valid records are then enriched to create flat files or directly load into target sap system
- Invalid records are sent to functional and business teams to review and take necessary action to fix them with migration consultants
- Data Loads
This step is where we load data into target SAP system using different load methodologies
- Data can be loaded to SAP target system using inbuilt SAP tool or through ETL tool
- LSMW, Migration cockpit , SAP BODS are some of the tools used
- IDOCs, Recordings, Direct Input programs, templates load methodologies can be used for data loads
- Postload data validations
This step is performed once you have loaded data into the target system, hence called as 'Postload Validations'. This is to make sure data has been loaded properly into system and can be checked in tcodes and tables
- Postload Pass report is created to report all the records which got loaded successfully without any errors
- Postload Fail report is created to report all the records which got failed during load process and error log is downloaded for those records for further analysis
- Postload change, this report can be maintained in some cases where field level values are compared between source and target data to make sure values did not get converted/changed during load process
The Data migration process definitely a comprehensive process and involves much deeper details then what is covered in this blog but the basic idea of this blog is to give users a broader picture how it looks like specially for audience who is new to process.
I will cover each of these steps in detail in upcoming blogs, so stay tuned! 🙂
Please do share and subscribe the blog and share your valuable feedback so that I can improve my content and help readers get more better learning experience around SAP data migration and data quality.
Happy Learning and reading!! 🙂
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