Businesses regularly find themselves needing to upgrade their IT systems. Every few years there is a need to upgrade or swap systems to accommodate changes happening inside and outside the business. This affects small and medium sized enterprises right up to the largest multi-national.
When IT changes occur it is most likely to have an effect on company data. More than ever a business relies on computerised data, its accounts package, sales, marketing, order tracking, and despatch databases, the list goes on. As the business continues to grow over the years the amount of data grows with it and so does its importance.
If the business has built its own software and data systems then moving or transforming the data is within its control. But what happens when it needs to move data from one third party software supplier to another?
In an ideal world, on the company’s instruction, both parties will talk to each other and work out how to move the data en masse. But it only takes the supplier you are leaving not to show willing (in their eyes why would they) or either party to say they cannot easily export or import the data and you have hit a major problem.
When it appears that the data cannot be moved using a simple import and export routine, business decision makers look to their staff (and possibly additional temporary staff) to read the data from the old system and type it into the new system record by record, field by field.
Instantly there are problems with this approach, the financial cost, the distraction of taking staff away from their core business roles to key in data, and the reduction in business performance during the changeover. Also the quality of the data deteriorates as human error causes miskeying the information into the new system.
Add another twist. Not just upgrading software but as a business embraces new technology. For example Blackberry are very useful to staff out of the office to can collect data when out in the field visiting customers. The Blackberry may give you an exported Excel spreadsheet with all the data collected but it’s worthless if you cannot get that valuable data into your core office system due to a lack of import routine.
So, how and where does Juchau-Thorpe come into all this?
First, we have 18 years experience of designing database systems and handling data. Therefore we can liaise between third party suppliers and our client to determine the most efficient route to migrate that valuable data. If no direct method can be found we will try to act as an intermediary transforming the data the old software can give us into a format the new software can accept.
When such a solution cannot be found we look at our automation approach. This is the automation of keystrokes and mouse clicks that a person would undertake during manual data entry.
When you analyse a staff member labouriously entering data from the old system to the other you quickly realise that a lot of the keystrokes and mouseclicks are common and repetitive.
We are able to write software that will grab data out of one window on the PC and simulate the keystrokes to enter it into the new system.
The benefits are the prevention of keying errors and enhanced data migration times of moving the data. A PC running our ‘robot’ software can usually key a minimum 30% faster than a member of staff across the whole process.
But most of all the number of staff you need to key data will decrease. Only peculiar or non standard records will need intervention as the robot PC handles the rest.
When the import and export process is not available we can give you bespoke robot PC software typing your data from one system to the other. Reduced costs, improved data quality, faster data migration times.
Juchau-Thorpe has been providing such automated solutions to several clients since 2004 and we are sure we can help.
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Peter Thorpe
Company Director