Data migration into Facility

[hmd01]

Hi there,

 

Does anyone have any recent experience of migrating from another MIS system to Facility? I am interested to know how well the data transferred from your old system to Facility.

 

I see from the demo that there is an option to import data from SIMS and SIMS.NET, so I am working on the basis that data from SIMS matches the fields in Facility ok.

 

However, if you are moving from another MIS to Facility (as we are), you have to provide SERCO with your data in Excel format, which they then load into your database as a one off exercise. That in itself seems problematic to me, as I want to 'play' with a snapshot of our data first so that we can train using that, and then when we are ready to go live, export the latest data to use in the live system.

 

So I am interested to know if anyone has any recent experience of this, and how well the data imported - did the fields match up ok? I have heard of schools where the data did not import very well so they gave up and typed all the information in manually(!) That was several years ago, and of course it does depend on what data they provided (if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out...), so any uptodate experiences would be useful to hear about.

 

Many thanks.

[Joe_Cole]

I think you'd need to talk to Serco about doing a second data transfer.

 

The success of otherwise depends to a certain extent as to how clean your data is in your current system and how much you want to take across. Inevitably a degree of tidying up will be involved. It's certainly worth trying to get your head round the structure of the main student tables in the Facility database in Facility as that will give you the option of using SQL as well as the Facility software to tidy data.

 

Are you planning to dual-run your old system alongside Facility for a while? I would recommend this, as it means there is not such a rush to get all your data across. This gives you time to assess how you might want to store data differently in Facility than you did in your old system.

[hmd01]

Thanks Joe. I was hoping to avoid dual-running the systems, as it seems like such an overhead, but I am slowly coming round to thinking that despite the short term pain, it might be for the best in the long run.