ERP migrations don’t fail because of bad software. They fail because too many teams treat them like an IT task, not a business transformation.

Many teams see their Dynamics 365 migration drifting past deadlines, or costs creep up while progress stalls. Even well-scoped projects with strong business cases run into blockers.

Here’s what we’ve learnt after seeing (and guiding) dozens of ERP migration projects:
Delays usually start with data. But the root problem is bigger — it’s a lack of upfront alignment between data, process, and ownership.

This is the second part of our series about ERP migration. In our previous article, we shared our playbook for a successful migration.

Four reasons your ERP migration is falling behind

1. Unmanaged customer and vendor data

Most legacy systems are bloated. One client we worked with had over 16,000 customer records, but only 2,700 were active. The rest were either duplicates, stale entries, or test data nobody cleaned up.

If your team doesn’t decide what to migrate and why before the project starts, you’re setting yourself up to move a mess from one system to another. And in Dynamics 365, that mess costs you — in time, storage, and performance.

2. No data readiness plan

Too many projects start with: “We’ll clean the data as we go.”

But once integrations begin and deadlines approach, that plan gets dropped. Then problems surface late: incorrect tax setups, mismatched payment terms, missing inventory units. These are all issues that weren’t visible until they broke something in testing.

Without a readiness plan, your team ends up fixing issues reactively. That’s when rework kicks in, timelines double, and your team’s confidence plummets.

3. Dirty data, no ownership

Inconsistent customer names. Duplicate vendors. Blank fields in mandatory columns. This is what we see when no one owns the data and no one’s accountable for fixing it.

ERP migration isn’t just about moving fields between tables. It’s about aligning business-critical records with how your new system is supposed to work. That takes decisions, not just scripts.

4. No dedicated migration team

One of the biggest red flags? When data migration is assigned “as a side task.”

ERP migrations affect every business unit. But many companies staff the project like it’s a back-office upgrade, until go-live panic sets in and suddenly, every department is firefighting data issues that should’ve been solved months ago.

What to do instead — A better way to plan your Dynamics 365 migration

Build a real data strategy before you migrate

Start by asking:

• What data do we actually use?

• What do we need to keep for compliance?

• What can we safely archive?

Then structure it for Dynamics 365. If you’re using Finance and Operations, that might mean reviewing data entities in the Data Management Framework, validating reference tables, and making sure your master data aligns with global address book logic.

Don’t wait for developers to ask these questions mid-project. Answer them early with business owners in the room.

Treat migration as transformation, not a lift and shift

The way you quote customers, manage stock, or post invoices might evolve in D365. So involve business process owners before you start migrating records.

Work backwards from your future-state workflows. Ask what data supports those processes, and define what needs to change, structurally, not just technically.

This approach helps avoid surprises later, like finding out your old pricing model doesn’t map cleanly to the new sales order flow.

Clean, enrich, and validate data upfront

Treat data quality as a project deliverable. Assign owners for each dataset — customers, vendors, products — and give them time to review, correct, and enrich records.

Use validation runs in a test environment to catch issues early. We typically run weekly load cycles into a staging environment, using Azure Data Factory + SQL with a bronze–silver–gold architecture to control quality step by step.

Allocate real resources early

Your best functional experts should be part of the migration team. If they're only looped in at go-live, they’ll spend weeks untangling misaligned setups that could’ve been avoided.

This isn’t just an IT project. It’s a business-critical initiative. Treat it like one.

TL;DR: You can still get back on track

If your ERP migration feels stuck, it’s not too late, but the fix probably isn’t more developers or another integration patch.

It’s a shift in how you’re planning, resourcing, and governing the work.

• Define a clear data strategy

• Align migration to business process transformation

• Assign data owners and validate early

• Treat migration as a dedicated workstream, not an afterthought

Our clients turn to us to get a structured approach tailored for Dynamics 365 — so if you’re feeling stuck with your ERP migration or planning one, let’s talk.

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