Interviews

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 01 - January/February 2010

A major issue for organisations migrating to a new ERP or financial system is the potential cost of ongoing parallel running of both systems.

Document management vendors can help reduce these costs via a managed legacy decommissioning process, as EASY Software's Howard Frear explains to DM Editor David Tyler

David Tyler: Businesses have been moving from one ERP system to another for decades now: aren't the ERP vendors themselves offering tools to assist in migration? Where do DM companies fit in?
Howard Frear: Where we are starting from in our thinking is this: that most organisations of whatever size will at some point change their ERP or accounting platform, and quite possibly any of a number of other platforms as well - CRM, HR, in fact any database driven application that they are using to run their businesses.

There are plenty of tools available that allow users to transpose the client or vendor data, from fields in one system's database, to new fields in another system's database. That's nothing new; it's established practice by most vendors of that kind of solution, whether from Agresso to SAP, from Great Plains to Navision - whatever.

But there is some fairly business critical data that doesn't get picked up in this process, because many of these suppliers only offer solutions that will do the 'bare minimum' if you like, of the data transposition that is actually required. For instance, in ERP and accounting platforms (where of course we have significant experience), all they might do is take the vendor data, client data, General Ledger and other financial systems information that's held within the original system. The user is then in a position where they will almost certainly have to keep the old and new systems running in parallel - for anything up to potentially seven years!

DT: The potential cost of running two major business applications in parallel is enormous, clearly - why do so many firms feel they have to adopt this 'belt-and-braces' approach?
HF: This is for two reasons: firstly, the company has to ensure that it remains audit-compliant. If an auditor queries something and you've turned your old system offline, you could have problems because you cannot effectively recreate any transactions. In pharmaceutical companies it could be even worse, as they may have to keep records on the life of a product for periods of ten or twenty years. So for some organisations, they have to take the view that they simply can't afford to have any of that data not available. In heavy engineering or aerospace manufacture, they have to have that information available for their own compliance purposes.

It is very difficult for the vendors of these systems to manage the actual transactional information. In the good old days that would have meant paper in a filing cabinet, but now of course in terms of document management it could mean sales invoices, financial statements, G/L reports, etc. All this stuff fundamentally exists as data within the database, which is recreated as business documents - which do NOT move across to a new ERP system, for instance. It is too complex for that system's vendor to handle - because all the numeric and system references are different between the two platforms. That is the nature of ERP systems!

For example, you decide to move to the latest SAP system because you want the latest and best functionality. You give your information to the vendor, they deploy the new system, and you decide that as of Monday morning everyone is to use the new system. But of course, come Monday morning, you will get a call from a supplier or customer querying an earlier transaction. At that point you are probably going to have to go back into the old legacy system to find it, from within the new system - so you have to keep both systems running in parallel. 

DT: It's a good point - so what does a vendor like EASY bring to the mix that the SAPs and Oracles of this world can't?
HF: What people tend to miss is that document history can be just as important to the business as the fields within any system. You have to be able to show, for instance, that you have received an invoice; that you sent a proof-of-delivery, and so on - any or all of which might be queried at some future point. So our view was that this is at its root a document management issue. In SAP terms these are 'business documents' - objects that you could print out and have as a real world hard copy.  So if a customer requests a copy of an invoice, you really need to be using a Document Management system of some sort to retrieve the content and create the copy of that invoice.

In a legacy decommissioning exercise, you can take that functionality - of being able to print out vast quantities of invoices, statements and other documents - put it all into an EASY Software system (for example!) and 're-connect' them to your new system. This gives you a much more complete picture of the data that's been moved across from the old to the news system.  Systems like EASY will give powerful search options that are completely independent of those old and new system references: you can search by client name, for instance, and find all the documents that sit behind it.

DT: From a system perspective it seems a logical approach, but what are the key financial and/or management considerations to any legacy decommissioning exercise?
HF: What this gives you as a customer is the potential to switch off your old legacy system much earlier in the cycle. The big win here for both the IT function and the Finance Director is that they don't have to keep paying maintenance - or indeed for the hardware containing the old database - for anywhere near as long. Imagine the potential saving in terms of Total Cost of Ownership if you could switch off an ERP system after two years as opposed to seven years.

There are management considerations too - when you look at the larger ERP offerings particularly, you have to go to considerable trouble to retrain all your users, and the last thing you want, having spent all that money on a new system, is for those users to have to keep referring back to the 'old' system which, let's face it, they probably felt quite comfortable with. With our approach, all the information they might need is available from within the new system, so there is never any need for the user to 'go backwards' and be tempted to want to refer to the old system.

Our search and retrieval capabilities help to provide a more comfortable transition to the new platform - it's a very powerful argument.

More info: www.easysoftware.net

More info: www.easysoftware.net

Interviews