A lot of businesses are starting to use a data-centric mindset to help drive decisions. In the past, many decisions were based solely on intuition and customer feedback. While these are still crucial, trends and data are the cherry on top that really instills confidence in your direction.
Businesses collect data in a variety of ways. Some use automatic software, others have customers fill out forms, and sometimes, employees fill out spreadsheets themselves. Over time, businesses often change their methods of collection and where they store their data.
Eventually, these businesses find they have incohesive data that is difficult to run any meaningful analysis on. This discombobulated data also has a much higher risk of being lost or leaked due to its unmanaged state.
What are data consolidation and migration?
As mentioned above, businesses collect and store all of their data in a variety of ways. Migrating and consolidating involves taking the data from different sources and moving it to a singular location on a cloud server. Cloud ERP systems have prebuilt tools that will automatically integrate data from certain software. In some cases, companies develop a custom format for storing their data that requires a more specialized migration.
Reasons why you should migrate and consolidate data:
There are many benefits to consolidating data, such as cleaning up hard drive space. In addition, there are some bonuses when you pair data with cloud ERP systems. Let’s look at some of the benefits of moving your data into an ERP system.
Make your data work seamlessly with ERP analytic tools
Cloud ERP systems come with a lot of useful analytical tools and data visualizations. You may have come across dashboards, one of the most popular ways to visualize data. ERP systems can automatically draw from integrated data sources to create a huge range of graphs and reports automatically. Furthermore, your analytical tools will inherently understand the formatting of your data and can advance statistical analyses on it.
Increase your data security
When your data is split up and stored on different servers or hard drives it can be hard to keep track of. Maybe an employee takes a workstation home that contains sensitive information. It’s easy to see how this could turn into a large problem, even if unintentionally.
When you migrate and consolidate data to a cloud server you know it’s all in one place. On top of that, these servers come with the most up-to-date cybersecurity software that’s regularly updated to counter cyberattacks.
Setup automated data collection
Automating business processes is a great way to reduce spending and increase product quality. Data collection happens to be one of the easiest processes to automate. When you automatically record information from a customer or business-to-business interaction, your data visualizations are also updated in real-time. That makes it very simple to monitor the trends of your incoming data at any given moment with no preparation needed.
Things to consider when you migrate your data
Data migration has some associated costs that you’ll need to consider. The methods used play an important role in the safety and security of your data. Here are some things to keep in mind:
The cost to migrate your data
You’ll have to buy the space to store the data, but this space is fairly affordable. In most cases, you will want to hire, or at least consult, some specialist to help with the migration. While this does add some costs, the advantages it will bring in data consistency is worth it.
The team that will handle migration
An ideal team consists of employees of the business that know their data well and specialists to help migrate. Decisions will determine how to format data, which data is right for migrating, and which data may be better left out. Specialists help create custom templates and processes for integrating your data into the systems and know which existing data sources can easily integrate with certain ERP systems.
Should you migrate all of your data?
If you have a wealth of data spanning over a decade, you may not need all of it. Some data may exist from a product you no longer sell or data on an employee that is no longer part of your team. Whatever the reason, you can save some costs on both migration time and data storage by cutting unneeded data. It helps to have a goal in mind for exactly what information and analytics you want to get from your data.
If you have any questions about data migration or consolidation, contact us. At Premier Computing, we’ve implemented quality business solutions since 1952.
