Leaving an ERP you've run for a decade feels like moving a machine shop across town while it's still cutting chips. Here's what actually moves, what should stay behind, and how a parallel run keeps the risk near zero.

WHY SHOPS START LOOKING
The trigger is rarely one big failure. It's a hundred small ones: travelers printed and lost, quotes built in Excel because the estimating module fights you, month-end job costing that arrives three weeks after the job shipped, and an annual maintenance invoice that keeps climbing. When the workaround spreadsheets outnumber the ERP screens your team actually uses, the system has already been replaced — you're just still paying for it.

WHAT MOVES, WHAT ARCHIVES, WHAT STARTS FRESH
A clean migration is selective. Customers, vendors, parts, BOMs, and routings move — your routings are the crown jewels, and they should arrive in Workover ERP as working digital travelers, not spreadsheets to rebuild. Open work orders, open POs, and inventory balances move so you can cut over mid-stream. Closed job history typically archives to read-only reporting rather than cluttering the live system, and GL history usually moves as opening balances plus one or two comparative years.

THE PARALLEL RUN IS THE WHOLE BALLGAME
The migrations that fail are the ones that cut over on faith. The ones that succeed run both systems on live work for two to four weeks: same jobs, same clock-ins, same invoices. When the job cost on WO-2041 matches in both systems three Fridays in a row, cutover stops being scary. Your legacy system then goes read-only — not to the shredder — so history is always one search away.

A REALISTIC TIMELINE

For a single shop, plan on four to eight weeks: one to two weeks of field mapping and test loads, two weeks of sandbox use by your own crew, two to four weeks of parallel run, and a weekend cutover with an engineer on call Monday morning. Multi-site operations phase by location. What you should not accept is an open-ended consulting engagement — insist on fixed scope in writing, and read our migration and integration process for exactly what that looks like.

See it on your data. Bring one real job — a quote, a traveler, and the invoice — and watch it flow end to end in a 30-minute live demo.