The CEO of a 200-employee equipment rental business said something I hear on almost every project: the data is messy, but we will clean it after go-live. They went live on a Monday.
By Wednesday, four branches were renting equipment that did not exist in the system, and two customers had been invoiced twice. Data problems do not wait for a cleanup phase.
Myth 1: We will clean it later
There is no later. Once people start transacting on bad data, every new record inherits the mess. Their duplicate customer list grew from 1,900 records to 2,600 in five weeks because nobody could tell which record was real.
Cleaning it afterward cost $230,000 in overtime, temporary staff, and customer credits. Doing it before go-live was quoted at $48,000. Same work, different timing, five times the price.
Myth 2: Our data is not that bad
Every company believes this. Then you run three simple checks and the belief quietly dies.
- Duplicate check on customer and item master. The rental company found 22% duplicates.
- Orphan check: records with no owner, no location, or no cost attached. They found 1,400.
- Unit of measure check: how many items are bought in cases and sold in single units? They found 340 mismatches.
Myth 3: IT will handle the migration
IT can move files. IT cannot decide whether Acme Rentals and Acme Rental LLC are the same customer. That call belongs to sales and credit, and it always will.
Data ownership belongs to the department that lives with the consequences. Assign one business owner per data group: customers, items, vendors, employees, pricing.
Myth 4: We only need the last two years
Maybe. But sales will want three years for trend reporting, and legal may need seven. Decide the cut-off in writing, with the people who will complain later, before anyone starts extracting.
Here is what I would do this week. Pick your customer master and your item master. Run a duplicate count and a blank-field count. That one-hour exercise tells you more about go-live risk than any project plan, and it is the cheapest piece of ERP Consulting you will ever buy. Any ERP Consulting team that calls migration a technical task has never sat through a credit hold meeting.