7 Tips to Prepare Data For Salesforce Migration

 Transferring your property’s movable assets requires careful planning and the right resources. You need the right-sized truck to move furniture and experienced laborers who can load and dispatch crucial items safely. Transferring company records is equally challenging for businesses with large heaps of data.

As a business, you use multiple work apps on a day-to-day basis. These apps contain data that is exchanged with business departments, clients, and customers on a day-to-day basis. However, since the majority of business apps are decentralized and offer limited storage, data exchange is often an indispensable and time-consuming affair. 

“Only 28 percent of business apps are integrated which makes data migration a crucial need for enterprises”.

Salesforce is a great platform to migrate and unify your enterprise data. You can leverage the platform's built-in and third-party tools to migrate seamlessly from disparate systems to Salesforce. Salesforce Data Migration allows you to overcome the security, storage, and accessibility limitations of decentralized systems.  

While Salesforce Migration is beneficial to enhance productivity and bridge data silos, its preparation requires careful planning. Lack of preparation can result in data loss or change in data behavior. Before you conduct a full-fledged/partial data migration in Salesforce, do spend a little time planning and preparing your data.

In this blog, we have listed 7 tips to prepare your data for migration. So without further ado, let’s jump straight in:

1. Share the Scope of Migration Clearly

Business executives have a clear-cut understanding of project scope. However, before you prepare data for migration, do discuss with all stakeholders and migration specialists about what you intend to do post-migration. This will give them a clear approach for data analysis, selection, identification, and migration order.

2. Conduct a Full-Fledged Data Audit

From spreadsheets to word documents, there are various formats and files where data is stored. Many times, the data is duplicated and repetitive. Conducting a comprehensive data analysis can help you eliminate unnecessary spreadsheets from migration which otherwise would take a lot of time and cause a situation of confusion.

3. Segregate Your Data into Groups

Do group your data in various categories. This will help users to understand what was migrated and where the data is present post-migration. Do group your data into three categories such as: 

1. Data to be migrated

2. Data to be deleted

3. Data to be archived for a certain period (let's say 1 year or 2 years)

4. Select Custom Fields Carefully

If you want to add custom fields, select multi-select picklists and pursue single select picklists and optional fields for additional data collection. To monitor and distribute data, select single select picklists as it runs very fast.

5. Clean the Clutter Completely

Before you proceed with data migration, do know the organizational and management rules of the database. Differentiating vital information can help you ensure the consistency and validity of the transmitted data. Additionally, don’t forget to merge or replace incomplete records so that records remain original and consistent.

6. Backup Old Environment Data

Before you initiate on-premise to Salesforce or Salesforce to Salesforce Data Migration, do ensure your old environment data is backed up. This is an important consideration as your migration process can fail at times. To secure data backup, you can use credible tools like Trujoy or any other as suggested by your data migration expert. You can check in with your migration partner to know your immediate backup needs.

7. Understand Your Project Timeline

Salesforce Data Migration timeline varies from project to project. For simpler projects, migration can be completed within hours or a few days, however, for big projects it may take weeks or months. Before you migrate data to Salesforce, check if the data is properly validated or not. This will help you know the timeline/cost of the project, based on which you can hire suitable migration experts. 

Bottomline

Data Migration plays a crucial role in enhancing collaboration and communication levels in an organization. Before you plan for migration, do segregate, clean, and validate data. Additionally, check for backup and include all important stakeholders. By following the above tips, you will have a better approach for Salesforce Data Migration and make the best use of your enterprise data. In case you need our assistance, feel free to reach us at Damco Group.

Damco Group is a Salesforce Consulting Company offering diversified services ranging from CRM implementation to administration. Our data migration services aim at seamless switchover from on-premise/cloud platforms with minimal downtime.