Moving data between systems cleanly is its own discipline. There is the one-off migration when you replatform or retire a legacy system, and there is the ongoing sync once two systems have to stay in step with each other. We do both, with the reconciliation and rollback planning that keeps a cutover from becoming an incident.
When you need a migration
- Replatforming — moving from one ecommerce, ERP or CRM platform to another and bringing the history with you.
- Consolidating several systems, or several instances of the same system, into one.
- Post-acquisition, where two organisations’ data has to be merged onto a single platform.
- Retiring a legacy or in-house system and lifting its data somewhere supported before it is switched off.
How a migration runs
- Field-level mapping agreed in writing before any data moves, including how edge cases and legacy quirks are handled.
- Extract and transform into the target’s format, with validation on every record.
- Dry runs into a staging copy of the target system — usually several — so the real cutover is rehearsed, not attempted blind.
- Reconciliation reports after each run: record counts, financial totals and sampled spot-checks, so you can sign off on the numbers rather than take it on trust.
- A dated cutover plan with a defined freeze window, a go / no-go checklist and a rollback path.
- Supported go-live and a short stabilisation period afterwards.
Ongoing sync
Where both systems stay in use after go-live, a migration becomes a sync. The hard part is not moving the data once — it is deciding what happens when the same record changes in two places.
- One owning system per field, agreed in discovery and written down.
- A conflict strategy per field group — owner wins, merge by field, or quarantine for a human to review.
- An origin marker on every change so an update that came from System A is not bounced back to System A as if it were new.
- Event-driven propagation — changes move within seconds, not on an overnight batch.
- A transaction log so any single record can be traced from either side.
Data quality
Deduplication and normalisation run as records move, not as a separate clean-up project six months later. Bad addresses, inconsistent casing, duplicate customers and orphaned references are caught at the boundary.
What you get
- The mapping document and the migration scripts.
- Every reconciliation report, so the migration is auditable after the fact.
- For a sync: the live integration, its field-ownership map and a runbook — handed over, yours to keep.
Talk to us about a migration
Tell us the source and target systems and roughly how much data is involved. We will come back with an approach, a fixed price and a cutover outline. Get in touch or call 01303 883111.