ADP PayForce to SAP migration

During the last three weeks I have been working on migrating ADP PayForce database to SAP HCM.

Here are some notes:

• Data migration will be easier if you re-create the ADP DB structure for the required tables on your own SQL server. Extracting from ADP can be done through Crystal and you don't want to write and test your queries on extremely slow web-based Crystal. Instead of going through all SAP infotypes and re-creating the whole table structure, go through each infotype separately and create tables as needed.
• SAP requires "From" and "To" range of dates for any master data import. ADP only has an "Effective Date", which means you will not be able to import employee history. You can only get the current data, for which you can specify "12-31-9999" (infinity) as the "To" date. I already thought of many different case scenarios and I ended up concluding that the historic data import is simply impossible, especially with the fact that ADP can have multiple entries on a single day with a logical "Effective Sequence".
• Clean up your data in ADP before importing it into SAP. This is self-explanatory. SAP simply won't accept bad data and you will have to go back and forth, fixing data in ADP first and then re-extracting table data. One-time data change before import into SAP won't work...most probably you will have to run multiple queries against the same data at different points of time (say to upload "Initial Conversion" and then final master data). Also, this is your best time and chance to term all inactive "shadow" employees that have been sitting in PayForce.
• There will be lots of data fields which SAP requires that doesn't exist in ADP; and ADP will have lots of data that SAP doesn't. Cover requirements first, then move on to optional "nice to have" data.
• Do not allow your implementation team to run dual-entries between master data uploads. Master data upload has to happen once, period. Dual entry or entry-tracking will bring a lot of potential issues, especially if your master data gets changed a lot. Provide test data to your development team early, let them test everything on a development server. Once everyone is satisfied with the results, provide a cut-over date after which no data is modified in ADP. That will be your day of re-extraction of all data from ADP.
• Change ADP accounts to read-only so that data is not modified after the extraction process.

I'm sure there is a lot more to this than the above - I will keep updating this page as we go through this painful process.

Nasim Mansurov is a professional photographer based out of Denver, Colorado. He is the author and founder of The Mansurovs, along with a number of other online resources. Read more about Nasim here.

Related posts:

1. ADP Payforce data extraction to SAP
2. Why ADP PayForce sucks – again!
3. ADP PayForce is EVIL!
4. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) - Part One