Data Migration Done Right: Moving to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP Without Losing Your History

of data migration projects fail or exceed their planned budget and timeline — making migration risk closer to the norm than the exception for any ERP implementation.

The research on this is unusually precise about the root cause: 65% of failed migration projects allocated less than 20% of their overall timeline to planning — meaning the teams that struggle most tend to rush straight into moving data without first doing the unglamorous work of understanding, cleaning, and mapping it properly. The same pattern shows up in testing: failed projects spend an average of just 15% of their timeline on testing the migrated data, compared with 30-40% in projects that succeed. The gap isn't subtle. It's roughly double.

Data migration also tends to be a larger piece of the overall project budget than most companies initially assume — typically representing 30-50% of a total IT modernization spend — and poor data quality carries an ongoing cost even after go-live, with organizations losing an estimated $1.5 million annually, on average, to problems traced back to bad data. That's not a one-time migration cost; it's a recurring tax on decision-making, reporting accuracy, and operational efficiency that persists for as long as the underlying data quality issues go unaddressed.