Data Migration: The Underestimated Challenge of Moving to SAP S/4HANA

Governance: establishing clear ownership for each data domain (customer, material, vendor, financial) so that decisions about what “correct” data looks like are made by the business function that actually understands it.

Validation: testing migrated data against defined business rules and reconciliation checks, not simply confirming that a record count matches between source and target.

Reconciliation: a formal, signed-off comparison between legacy and migrated financial and operational data, sufficient to satisfy both the business and, where relevant, auditors that the transition preserved data integrity.

Skipping or compressing any one of these disciplines under timeline pressure tends to produce the same downstream pattern: a go-live that appears successful on the day itself, followed by weeks of manual data correction, reconciliation disputes between finance and IT, and user distrust of a system that is producing numbers people do not believe — even when, technically, the migration was executed correctly.

One further point deserves emphasis: data validation is not a task that can be fully delegated to the systems integrator responsible for the technical build, however capable that integrator is, because the integrator’s incentive is generally to demonstrate that migration jobs ran successfully — not to independently verify that the business logic embedded in reconciliation reports, UAT sign-offs, and cutover runbooks reflects what the business actually needs. That verification role is, by design, better suited to an independent party without a stake in the build itself.

Orpington Technologies’ Full ERP Diagnostic Report verifies data-migration evidence — reconciliation reports, UAT sign-off, and cutover runbooks — against the underlying business requirement, rather than simply confirming that a technical migration job completed; the same profiling-through-reconciliation discipline underpins the data migration work Orpington leads directly through its Full ERP Implementation Partnership and ERP Staff Augmentation. Organizations approaching a data migration, or auditing one already underway, are welcome to discuss which model fits.