Get ready for the dress rehearsal! One of the most beneficial, yet often most overlooked, parts of a project is a full data mock-cutover. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement a new product information management system, and then go into a production cutover without being fully prepared. An unsuccessful or messy go-live not only will cost additional money to remediate, it erodes the user base’s confidence in a system which will cause additional issues down the road.
Sample data and test data is just that – sample and test data – there is no way to know exactly what issues might be encountered during a conversion without processing the full dataset into your new product information management (PIM) system at least one time. On the front end, full data loads will allow the project team to identify any modifications to configuration needed such as data quality rules or workflow process that may not have been caught with just subsets of data.
In a typical PIM implementation, there should be at least three environments used for implementation – Development, QA, and Production.
Proper preparation through multiple mock-cutovers provide the following benefits during production cutover:
- Reduces the amount of time that data and impacted source systems must be “frozen” or “blacked out” during a conversion by knowing the correct amount of time cut-over activities will take
- Identifies data anomalies in enumeration fields (Country of Origin, Division Codes, etc.) that may cause data to not load
- Affords an opportunity to conduct performance tuning in the production system to increase load time speeds
- Allows users during testing to identify issues that may not be seen using just sample set of data
- Determines optimal file structure and size of source files to decrease load times
Spending the time during the project to conduct multiple mock-cutovers pays dividends in the long run by reducing the amount of user downtime and ensuring data conversion accuracy. To learn more about how Infoverity addresses mock cutovers, see our Testing FlexiFrame. If you’d like to speak with a consultant with specialized expertise with product data and PIM mock cutovers, contact us.
Megan Cooper
Senior Consultant
