Tim Purcell shares the lessons learned from migrating from Sage 1000, highlighting the importance of early stakeholder involvement, clear planning, data mapping, modernising integrations, and careful execution to ensure a smooth, rewarding transition.
If you're currently considering migrating away from Sage 1000, I understand why you might feel hesitant. After all, migrating from a legacy system you've invested so much time and effort into is a significant step. At Datel, we've faced exactly the same challenge, so we know exactly how you feel.
Having completed our own migration from Sage 1000 a few years ago, we've learned valuable lessons that can ease your journey. Here’s a detailed look at the key insights and practical advice that can help guide your migration path.
A successful migration isn't purely a technical project, it's about people. One of the most crucial lessons we learned is that this process is really around the people in your team, and how they can work together and learn from each other to make the transition as smooth as possible.
From our experience, ensuring that we had key stakeholders from each business area involved right from the start was fundamental. This meant engaging staff who had deep knowledge and ownership of existing business processes and who could foresee the impact of any changes. Equally, these stakeholders needed to have clear accountability and a full understanding of their roles throughout the process.
By actively involving the right team members early on, we were able to address potential challenges proactively and keep morale high. Two critical factors in a smooth migration...
Your data is the lifeblood of your business. Any migration puts your data at risk of disruption unless you understand exactly how it moves through your systems.
We found that detailed mapping of our data flows helped us identify exactly where data entered, moved, and interacted within Sage 1000. This mapping process provided a clear roadmap, highlighting areas where data transformation or clean-up was necessary before moving to our new system.
With a comprehensive view of data flow, our team could confidently make decisions and execute migration steps, significantly reducing the risk of data integrity issues during the migration process.
Another significant lesson we learned was how crucial clear milestones were to our migration’s success. Breaking the project into defined stages, each with an accountable owner, gave us focus and momentum. By making progress visible across the whole business, we kept everyone aligned and engaged, ensuring challenges were spotted early and addressed before they became problems. This shared visibility and ownership helped us pass each milestone smoothly and maintain confidence throughout the migration.
Legacy systems like Sage 1000 often become deeply embedded in business processes, with extensive integrations and customisations built around them over the years. It's understandable why some businesses might resist migrating because of the complexity involved.
However, we discovered that migration presents a rare opportunity (not just to replicate existing processes) but to genuinely modernise and streamline them. During our migration, we undertook a thorough assessment of each integration and customisation surrounding our Sage 1000 system, asking ourselves these essential questions:
No matter how much you prepare, execution is ultimately what determines the success of your migration. One big takeaway from our own experience was the value of clear communication and careful timing.
We ensured each stage of our migration execution was closely monitored and communicated across our teams. We emphasised the importance of rehearsing migration steps beforehand wherever possible. These practice runs allowed our team to identify and mitigate potential issues ahead of time, providing greater confidence when it came to executing the live migration.
Additionally, we scheduled our migration go-live for times that minimised disruption on day-to-day operations, allowing internal teams to quickly adapt to new processes without significant downtime.
Addressing your reluctance to migrate
If you're hesitant to migrate from Sage 1000, know that your concerns are completely valid. From our own migration experience, and from discussions with many of our customers, we recognise businesses are often attached to Sage 1000 because you’ve invested significantly in creating custom solutions, processes, and integrations that genuinely work for your business.
Yet, what we've consistently seen is that the effort involved in migration is significantly outweighed by the benefits gained. These benefits typically include:
Operational efficiencies.
Greater automation.
A foundation that's far better equipped to support future growth.
Our migration journey taught us that knowing where to start is often half the battle. If you're feeling overwhelmed, our advice is straightforward: start small. Break the migration into manageable steps. Begin with an initial audit to identify exactly what you have, how it's used, and what genuinely needs to be carried forward.
Engaging a knowledgeable migration partner early on, who can guide you through a structured, manageable approach, will also greatly reduce uncertainty. This partner should not only have technical expertise but also a deep understanding of your business.
We've genuinely been where you are. We've experienced first-hand the uncertainty, the effort, and ultimately the significant rewards that migration can deliver. I hope that by sharing these lessons, I can help you navigate your own migration journey more confidently and effectively.
While migration from Sage 1000 may initially feel like a daunting hill to climb, our experience proves it's very much achievable and extremely worthwhile.
If you’ve got any questions about migrating from Sage 1000 or you need some advice on what could be next for your business then reach out to us - we’re here to help and support you.