Data migration is a very important stage of the salesforce project. If you want an efficient salesforce CRM then you must plan for data migration carefully. For succeeding and a better implementation of salesforce data migration, you should follow the best practices. 

In this article we are going to share some tips on how to do that. In the meantime, why do you quickly go through these two articles about best practices for quality software and metrics in software.  

Stages and their Timelines

The salesforce migration project can be broken down in multiple phases, each with their own timeline. There are roughly about 6 phases. The time required to complete each stage depends upon the complexity of the work done and final results. But the whole migration can take from 20 days to 2.5 months in total. 

Let’s talk about each stage in detail.

Preparation

This preliminary phase starts with the developer’s investigation of the customer’s legacy CRM. This helps them understand structure of the data stored, its format, inconsistencies between CRM objects and business workflows. They then create the checklist for the data transfer.

The developers then move on to making database tables that were used by the customers mapping fields to correspond to fields in the salesforce CRM. In the end, a quality check of the data is performed so that it is made sure that there are no duplicates and the data is readable and valid. This at most takes up to 5 days.

Data Migration Tool 

If the developers use a ready-made data migration tool, then it’ll probably take a few hours. That’s best only if the number of imports is up to 5000,000. In other cases, the developers create a custom tool for automatic migration of data to salesforce. 

The time it takes for the tool development depends upon the number of the CRM entities to be transferred and the differences in the structure of the data between the new and old CRM. When a custom tool is developed, it takes around 1 month. 

Trial 

In order to test the tool and identify any issues in it, the developers perform trial data migration. This takes around 2 days. 

Validation by Customer

 The customers observe the results of the trial and give their feedback. If the feedback is positive then it means there is no need for further improvement in the mapping and data transfer. When the customer validation is received and the project is finalized. This may take around 4 days. If there is a suggestion of improvement by the customer, the timeline might extend to over a week. 

Final Migration

At this point all the data is migrated from the old CRM to the salesforce CRM. Once again, before going to the production stage things are checked for quality. This may take a day or two at the weekend so that the CRM users are not impacted by the migration process. 

Support Activities

The normal support activities post data migration include solving any issues that customer may face. This kind of support continues for up to a week and at most for a month after going live with the new salesforce solution. 

Final Words

 So, to sum it up, salesforce data migration can be simple or complicated. It depends on multiple factors. But on average it takes anywhere from 20 days to 2 and a half months. There are various phases of data migration and they are all concluded in this period. This includes the post launch support phase.