Geographical area or type of customers assigned to a sales unit such as salesperson, sales manager, franchisee, distributor, or agent etc. are the main components of dividing sales process of an industry based on territories. Not only the sales process, but several other business logics also implement territorial structures these days in order to enhance and normalize the way they do their business.
Greytrix has designed and implemented several such sales and, organization processes workflows for well settled industries in Indian as well as abroad.
Now why do we term this post as Territory Migration? Some days ago we came across the scenario for one of our clients where we needed to restructure and reorganize all the territories created in CRM. With the standard mechanism provided through Sage CRM it seems to be very much easy task. In CRM we have options to Move territory, Merge territory, Create new or Edit existing territories.
All of the above tasks work fine in standard build, but they need to be much more accurate as the territory structure causes entire data in CRM to be reorganized. For E.g. Move territory functionality causes the entire data in one territory to move to another territory. Sometimes a blank territory in related records or within the table cause this functionality to through an error and stop the entire process of territory movement, though it reverts back the changes did till it crashes out. In such scenario the step we can follow is to find out the records causing the problems may be within millions of record within that table which is quite a tedious task. Such migration and reorganization of territories involves several important tasks to be taken care of like mentioned below.
1. Create the new structure on different copy of CRM with blank data.
2. Compare the old and new structures in order to find out how many territories are to be merged, moved, edited or created now.
3. Note down the mapping between the old and new structure.
4. Design the steps to be carried out to migrate the territories and their data manually. In this way we can ensure more accuracy and data movements at minute level
5. Create copy of original database and import territories table through excel sheet or something for new structure. Follow all the steps that we have designed to migrate the data through above steps and carry out the migration.
6. With the help of two different instances of CRM compare the data in old and new structures to validate the territory structure movements.
7. After proper validation as explained above we can follow the same steps on live system and make it up and running with new structure in minutes.
We at Greytrix have done several such territory structure reorganization, migration of the territorial data tasks and we are quite experienced in the problems being faced based in migration on the level of normalization in data.