Migration of Existing Customers
How do you move from legacy systems to a modern CPQ and Billing setup without losing critical history or introducing errors? Let’s talk about best practices to ensure your current customers transition smoothly to your new system now, in our third part of “Five Critical Insights for a Successful CPQ-Billing Transformation”. If you haven’t yet read part one and two, be sure to start there!
Successful CPQ and Billing transformations not only provide an updated quoting and billing flow for net new customers, but also a streamlined, standardized data model for ongoing billing, amendments, and renewals of existing customers. Translating legacy customer data into the new, transformed data model is no small feat. A comprehensive and strategic data migration approach must be developed to ensure invoicing continuity as well as quoting continuity for customers within the deal cycle. Existing customers and data need not only to be migrated to the new billing system to allow for continued invoicing but also to the CPQ system for future amendments and renewals to maintain your customer base.
Depending on the size and structure of your legacy data, a phased approach for cutover rather than full migration of existing accounts at the time of go-live may be the best path forward. If a phased approach is selected, then subsets of data for each migration must be determined (such as by account type or product line) and worked in order of priority. We recommend beginning with your simplest use cases or data structures and progressing to more complex and nuanced customers for later migration runs. Although migrating in phases may prolong cutover to your new systems, it can help reduce risk by limiting impact of each migration run and allowing rolling training of your employee base.
Once an approach is determined, data migration efforts should be treated as a co-terminus workstream within your CPQ and Billing transformation and develop alongside your future state design (for both CPQ and Billing). The first step always remains the same: consolidation and cleansing of source data. Disjointed or highly manual billing processes (the kind that are most in need of replacement) often result in equally chaotic source data for migration. Discrepancies between historical contracts, pricing structures, and billing schedules need to be identified and reviewed before a migration structure can be determined.
With a plan in hand for data cleansing, the data mapping exercise can begin to ensure that CPQ and legacy billing records translate correctly into each system. This process is technical and time consuming but is paramount to a successful transformation to ensure all source data is translated correctly to the proper future state structure.
Key Considerations for Data Mapping:
Do legacy products map 1:1 to the new product catalog? If not, what data will determine the correct product mapping?
Are there any retired product or pricing models (meaning no future state structure to map to) that will need to be reviewed and solved for as part of the migration?
Does the legacy product data include bundles or is it a flat structure? If flat, what data will inform which bundles to map to? If bundles previously existed, do they align to the new structure or will a more complex mapping be required?
How must source pricing/billing amounts be translated to the new pricing waterfall to allow for accurate amendments and renewals?
The last, and arguably most important, step is testing, testing, and more testing. Practice migration runs should be performed regularly to ensure that data accurately lands in both CPQ and Billing. Migrated billing data must be tested to ensure continuity and accuracy in invoicing. Amendment and renewal use cases must be verified not only in CPQ but also against the billing system to ensure proper transfer of updated contract details. In short, all tests to verify the net-new design should also be performed with migrated data and an iterative approach should be expected. Source data is being mapped to future state structures in both CPQ and Billing; preparation is key.
Successful data migration isn’t just about moving records, it’s about business continuity, billing accuracy, and preserving the customer experience. Once you’ve successfully migrated to your future system you’re halfway there. The second half? Ensuring that your systems can speak the same language. Coming up in part four of “Five Critical Insights for a Successful CPQ-Billing Transformation,” we’ll dive into integrations. There we’ll eliminate bottlenecks, automate processes, and choreograph data flow at every step. Stay tuned and reach out to us at info@ravusinc.com.
