Archiving your human resources data is never your first thought when you have bought a new system. As a kid can you imagine playing with your old toys when you just got a branch new toy? It is a similar feeling for us adults when we get new HR systems. “Finally we’re going to fix that nagging problem with our old system!”, I hear you scream triumphantly. But, you can’t start using that brand new system until you migrate your data over “..so what’s everybody standing around for get to migrating!”

Migrate Now!

Hold on there cowboy. What are you going to do with your old data? It’s standard practice to migrate only the last year of active records over to your new system leaving the old data hanging around in the old system. If you have your system on-premise then you might keep it there permanently, but if you are switching cloud vendors you have to do something with it or loose it. What was now an after thought is more front and center in the cloud.

Instead of focusing on the migration first what if you focused on the total data and consider archiving it first? “No I want my new system now!” I hear you yell. But, because the cloud has forced your hand at dealing with this historical data you need a smarter way to migrate. It’s too much work to migrate twice.

Archive First

If you archive your data first into a system like FuseHR you can easily generate your next system import package automatically! If you need an ILoad Template for Workday or UltiPro Connect for Ultimate this can be automated. This eliminates the need to migrate twice. Considering that migrating data can take a company between 3 – 6 months this will dramatically change the time you need to move to your new system and securely archive your older data. This is what we call “One Step Migration.”

When you start your archive process can be well ahead of your purchase process to ensure you have the time to back up the data, and be ready day one to go from purchase to go-live as quickly as possible. Starting your archive before your purchase reduces the risk that your migration will take too long and you end up extending your old contract and waste money.

One Step Migration also dramatically reduces the complexity of combining multiple systems together. This is something that is nearly impossible to do manually. But, reducing production systems can be a big win for companies that have acquired HR systems through mergers or acquisitions because it gives you a repeatable process to generate the data load to the next system.

Changing the way you think about HR data migration can be a game changer for your organization so you lower your down time during your migration, shorten your delivery time from purchase to go-live, and start using your new system faster.

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