Embarking on a HR system migration can feel like navigating a choppy sea. Are you about to start the journey, or are you already underway and starting to grasp the complexity? How can you quickly and accurately get your existing HR data ready for your new system?
Many businesses struggle to get clean, accurate data ready for their new HR system. Often, the new provider lacks the specialist skills to extract, clean, validate, and prepare your existing data. They’re experts in their system, not necessarily yours.
Our migration projects have included full Holidays Act remediations (which ensures your data’s accuracy before the move) and/or transfers from existing to new systems.
Mero’s expertise in HR systems, built from our Holidays Act Remediation projects, has enabled us to develop pre-built extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) mechanisms. This gives you a cost-effective and robust process for your migration.
We also offer low-cost, long-term data storage. This is crucial because many new HR systems only import the last 52 weeks of data. You still need to retain seven years’ worth of data for compliance, meaning you’ll need accessible archiving of your older data.
This diagram illustrates our robust HR data migration strategy. The process involves extracting data from various legacy HR systems, followed by comprehensive validation and data cleansing. After processing, we transfer the data to your new HR system. Finally, the complete dataset is archived for long-term access and compliance.
Essential Choices for a Successful Migration
Navigating your HR data migration requires making several crucial decisions. Leveraging Mero’s expertise can significantly streamline the process. Here are some key considerations:
Remediation: Should you remediate your existing data to ensure accurate earnings and entitlement balances in your new system? Mero’s HARE solution can help.
Data Integrity: How will you manage data integrity issues? Mero has pre-built validation checks to identify potential problems.
Data Extraction: What’s the best method to extract your existing data? We have expertise and “connectors” for many HR systems, making the process simpler.
Data Transformation: How will you transform data from multiple systems, correct errors, and reshape it for import? Our data-driven approach handles this efficiently.
Paper Records: What about paper records? If they can be scanned, our cloud platform can handle them.
Data Validation: How can you verify the accuracy of the data in your new system? We provide Excel-based reports for validation and matching.
Data Archiving: How will you archive the data you’re not migrating, while maintaining compliance? Mero offers a low-cost cloud solution.
Common Migration Challenges
Migrating HR data involves complex tasks that can easily overwhelm your team. We’ve seen many challenges, including:
- Bulk data extraction from systems that often lack the necessary reports or extracts.
- Data validation across multiple systems to ensure consistency.
- Manual data updates to correct errors.
- Data reshaping to match the import requirements of the new HR system.
A Data-Focused Approach
The best way to tackle these challenges is with a data-focused approach. Instead of migrating employee by employee, we treat your data holistically. Our tools simplify extraction, validation, merging, manipulation, and preparation. This approach:
- Handles large, complex datasets efficiently.
- Provides data insights and validation.
- Corrects issues before they reach the new system.
- Prepares data for direct import, reducing manual effort and errors.
- Creates a reusable process with an audit trail.
- Enables secure archiving of your existing data.
How Mero Can Help
Mero has extensive experience helping companies of all sizes and across various industries migrate their HR and payroll data. We’ve assisted with both remediations and migrations together, and full migrations without remediation.
Whether you’re a small organisation lacking in-house expertise or a large organisation dealing with vast data volumes and multiple systems, we can help. Our pre-built templates for many NZ payroll systems streamline the process.
Our approach focuses on understanding your data, the new system’s requirements, and designing a cost-effective solution with a full audit trail.
Partner with the Experts
The best way to ensure a successful migration is to partner with an organisation that has done it many times before. Contact us for a business discovery session. Let’s discuss your needs and develop a plan for a smooth transition.