text: Turbulence on the cloud journey — TyTags Australia
  "As it turns out, things did not go as smoothly as planned."
  We had a hard choice to make: would we throw away the existing investment in time and money, plus miss out on a truly awesome customer relationship management tool, or change out tactics? We chose the latter by deciding to drop our original plans to migrate the previous 3 years of MYOB accounting records into jCurve. New plan was to cut off the old MYOB accounts at the end of the financial year (June) and have jCurve take over at that time. What we lost in doing this was the ability to perform sophisticated financial analysis on margins and on matching sales to spending over the previous years. But the really important information - the customer sales data - was already imported, so we had at least that much.
  Early in our planning for the move to the cloud, we wrote down our key business processes. At least, we wrote down what we thought our processes were. As we began to implement the new software - especially in the areas of payments, bank deposits, and accounting, we discovered that there were many small 'workarounds' we were using in conjunction with MYOB. Many of these became problematic when moving to the new solution, not because they could not be done, but because they would need to be done in different ways. In some cases the workarounds were simply not needed anymore. Often, the challenge was as much trying to explain to the support specialist why we had done something a particular way in the past, and trying to find the most effective way to do the same thing in the new software. Examples included handling foreign exchange rates on inbound product: we use a forex service, but jCurve NetSuite does a fully automated lookup of forex rates for any date.
  Once we had migrated over the old customer records and sales data, we had our office staff begin to run MYOB and jCurve Netsuite side by side, to see if the new system would do what we wanted, while still maintaining our existing systems in case there was a problem. In hindsight, that was a bad move for a company of our size. That effectively doubled the entry of all business transactions, placing our key staff under a lot of stress. And of course when the new system does not approach the workarounds, nor is backed by a business-minded support specialist, dissatisfaction grew very quickly. And that lead to everyone - myself included - constantly viewing the new solution as a problem rather than simply as a tool. The problems were, of course, our workload and familiarity with the new solution.
  Our biggest win came when Charles - not exactly the most computer tollerant sort of guy - was able to process half a dozen orders single-handedly in one morning (with no extra training) and then request a report to see how different products were tracking against each other over the month. When he was able to see that as a graph, the smile on his face let us all know we'd overcome the worst of this turbulent journey