# ERP Migration Risk Assessment: Score Your Project Before It Starts > Source: https://netray.co/tools/erp-migration-risk-assessment > Publisher: Netray (netray.co), AI and integration engineering for ERP and manufacturing systems. > Section: Free Tools ## Short answer Answer 10 questions about your data, team, testing, and budget to get a migration risk score and a prioritized list of mitigations before your project starts. ## Category erp-migration ## Tool **Kind:** assessment **Questions:** #### How strong is executive sponsorship for the migration? **Options:** ##### No named sponsor; IT is driving it alone **Score:** 0 ##### A sponsor exists but is not actively engaged **Score:** 1 ##### Engaged sponsor who attends steering meetings **Score:** 2 ##### C-level sponsor with authority over budget and priorities, visibly engaged **Score:** 3 #### How would you rate the data quality in your legacy ERP? **Help:** Consider duplicate part numbers, obsolete BOMs, stale suppliers, and inconsistent units of measure. **Options:** ##### Poor: known duplicates, inconsistent masters, no ownership **Score:** 0 ##### Mixed: some clean domains, others neglected for years **Score:** 1 ##### Mostly clean with a few known problem areas **Score:** 2 ##### Clean, deduplicated, with named data owners per domain **Score:** 3 #### Are your legacy customizations documented and inventoried? **Options:** ##### No inventory; we discover customizations when they break **Score:** 0 ##### Partial list exists but purpose of many is unknown **Score:** 1 ##### Full inventory with owners, but business justification is dated **Score:** 2 ##### Full inventory with each item classified: retire, replace, or rebuild **Score:** 3 #### Do you have a complete inventory of integrations and interfaces? **Help:** Include EDI trading partners, MES, PLM/CAD, shipping, payroll, BI extracts, and undocumented file drops. **Options:** ##### No; interfaces are undocumented tribal knowledge **Score:** 0 ##### Major interfaces are known but edge cases are not **Score:** 1 ##### Documented inventory exists, not recently verified **Score:** 2 ##### Verified inventory with data flows, owners, and volumes **Score:** 3 #### How available is your internal team for the project? **Options:** ##### Key users must do project work on top of full-day jobs **Score:** 0 ##### Some time allocated but constantly reclaimed by operations **Score:** 1 ##### Core team has protected part-time allocation **Score:** 2 ##### Dedicated core team with backfill funded for their day jobs **Score:** 3 #### How well are your current business processes documented? **Options:** ##### Not documented; processes live in people's heads **Score:** 0 ##### Outdated documents that no longer match reality **Score:** 1 ##### Key processes documented and roughly current **Score:** 2 ##### Current process maps including exceptions and workarounds **Score:** 3 #### What is your testing strategy for the migration? **Help:** Strong programs plan multiple full mock conversions and structured user acceptance testing with real scenarios. **Options:** ##### None defined yet; we will test near the end **Score:** 0 ##### Single test pass planned before go-live **Score:** 1 ##### Multiple test cycles planned, scenarios partially defined **Score:** 2 ##### Multiple mock conversions plus scripted UAT with pass/fail criteria **Score:** 3 #### How much ERP migration experience does your team or partner have? **Options:** ##### First migration for both us and our partner on this platform **Score:** 0 ##### Partner has generic ERP experience but not our platform or industry **Score:** 1 ##### Partner has done this platform, but not our industry **Score:** 2 ##### Partner has repeatedly migrated this platform for similar manufacturers **Score:** 3 #### What budget contingency does the project carry? **Options:** ##### None; the budget is the vendor quote exactly **Score:** 0 ##### Under 10 percent contingency **Score:** 1 ##### 10-20 percent contingency, formally held **Score:** 2 ##### Over 20 percent contingency with a defined release process **Score:** 3 #### How was the go-live date chosen? **Options:** ##### Fixed by an external deadline regardless of readiness **Score:** 0 ##### Set top-down before scope was understood **Score:** 1 ##### Estimated from scope, but with pressure not to move **Score:** 2 ##### Derived from a bottom-up plan and movable if exit criteria fail **Score:** 3 **Bands:** #### High Risk: Do Not Start Yet **Min:** 0 **Max:** 39 **Verdict:** Your migration has multiple failure conditions active at once, and projects in this band routinely blow budgets by 50 percent or stall entirely. The good news is that every gap identified here is fixable before contracts are signed. Fixing them now is far cheaper than discovering them mid-project. **Recommendations:** - Secure a C-level sponsor with real budget authority before any other step - Run a 4-6 week data quality audit on item, BOM, customer, and supplier masters - Build a verified inventory of all customizations and integrations, including undocumented file drops - Fund backfill so core team members can actually work the project - Delay vendor selection until scope, data, and team readiness are addressed #### Moderate Risk: Fix Gaps Before Kickoff **Min:** 40 **Max:** 69 **Verdict:** You have a workable foundation but specific weak points that will surface as change orders and timeline slips if left alone. Most mid-market manufacturers start in this band. Targeted remediation over 60-90 days before kickoff typically moves projects into the low-risk band. **Recommendations:** - Prioritize your two lowest-scoring answers; they predict where the project will hurt first - Commit to at least two full mock data conversions with reconciliation reports - Formalize 15-20 percent budget contingency with a steering-committee release process - Classify every customization as retire, replace-with-standard, or rebuild before design starts - Make the go-live date conditional on written exit criteria, not the calendar #### Low Risk: Well Positioned to Execute **Min:** 70 **Max:** 100 **Verdict:** Your fundamentals are stronger than the majority of migrations we assess, and your remaining risk is concentrated in execution discipline rather than missing prerequisites. Protect what you have: risk scores degrade when sponsors rotate, key users get pulled back to operations, or scope creeps quietly. **Recommendations:** - Re-run this assessment quarterly; scores drift as staffing and priorities shift - Lock scope with a formal change-control board from day one - Schedule mock conversions early so data issues surface with months of runway - Keep sponsor engagement visible with monthly steering reviews and published decisions - Document exit criteria for go-live now, while nobody is under deadline pressure ## Content **Intro:** This assessment scores the risk of your upcoming ERP migration across the ten factors that most reliably predict success or failure, built for manufacturers moving off legacy platforms like Baan, SyteLine 8, or heavily customized systems. Industry studies consistently find that half or more of ERP projects overrun budget or schedule, and the causes are stubbornly repetitive: weak sponsorship, dirty data, unknown customizations, and starved internal teams. Ten honest answers take about five minutes and produce a risk band with specific, sequenced mitigations you can act on before signing anything. **Sections:** #### Why these ten factors **Body:** The questions map directly to the failure modes documented across two decades of ERP post-mortems and our own delivery experience in aerospace, defense, and discrete manufacturing. Executive sponsorship and team availability are people risks; they predict whether decisions get made and work gets done. Data quality, customization inventory, and integration inventory are discovery risks; they predict the size of the surprises waiting mid-project. Testing strategy, partner experience, contingency, and timeline realism are execution risks; they predict whether problems get caught early or at go-live. A project weak in all three clusters is not merely risky, it is statistically likely to fail, which is why the scoring weights every question equally rather than letting one strength mask several weaknesses. #### How scoring and bands work **Body:** Each answer scores 0 to 3, and your total is expressed as a percentage of the maximum, which is how the bands are applied. The bands are deliberately conservative because ERP migration punishes optimism: a project that looks eighty percent ready is not eighty percent safe, since the missing twenty percent tends to sit on the critical path. Scoring in the moderate band does not mean your project will fail; it means specific, named risks will generate change orders and slips unless you retire them before kickoff. Beyond the headline number, the distribution of your answers carries its own signal, so watch for these patterns as you review the results. **Bullets:** - Any single 0 on sponsorship, data quality, or team availability is a project-level red flag on its own - Clusters of 1s across discovery questions predict mid-project scope explosions - High scores everywhere except testing is the classic profile of a painful go-live - Scores tend to drop one full band when re-assessed honestly with the whole team in the room #### What to do with your result **Body:** Treat the assessment as a pre-flight checklist, not a verdict. If you scored high risk, the correct move is almost always to delay vendor commitment and spend 60-120 days on remediation: sponsorship, data audit, and customization inventory come first because everything else depends on them. If you scored moderate, negotiate your remediation items into the project plan explicitly so they are funded work, not assumptions. If you scored low risk, focus on preserving the score through execution, because sponsor turnover and reclaimed key users are the two most common ways strong projects degrade. In every band, re-running the assessment with your steering committee creates alignment that a solo score cannot. #### How Netray helps you de-risk the migration **Body:** Netray specializes in exactly these migrations: Baan and legacy SyteLine to modern Infor CloudSuite, LN modernizations, and complex multi-site moves for aerospace, defense, and electronics manufacturers. We run structured readiness audits that turn each weak answer in this assessment into a concrete remediation workstream with effort estimates, and our AI-assisted tooling accelerates the tedious parts, including customization inventories, data profiling, and integration discovery. Because we have delivered these projects repeatedly, we know which risks are cheap to fix now and catastrophic to fix later. Share your score with us and a migration specialist will walk your team through a prioritized de-risking plan. **Cta:** Send us your risk score and get a prioritized de-risking plan from a migration specialist. **Faq:** #### What is the most common cause of ERP migration failure? **Answer:** Research and our own delivery experience point to the same answer: people and data, not technology. Weak executive sponsorship means decisions stall and scope disputes fester; poor data quality means every conversion cycle surfaces new problems; and starved internal teams mean knowledge never transfers. Technical platform issues cause a small minority of failures. That is why seven of the ten questions in this assessment measure organizational and data readiness rather than technology. #### How long before a migration should we run this assessment? **Answer:** Ideally 6-12 months before your planned kickoff, because the highest-value mitigations, such as data cleanup, customization rationalization, and securing dedicated staffing, need months of lead time. Running it after contracts are signed still helps, but your leverage drops sharply once a vendor timeline is in motion. Re-run it quarterly during the project since scores drift as sponsors change and key users get reclaimed by operations. #### Our score was high risk. Should we cancel the project? **Answer:** Almost never. A high-risk score means the project should not start yet, not that it should not happen. Legacy platforms carry their own escalating risks, including unsupported software, retiring experts, and compliance exposure. The right response is a focused 60-120 day remediation phase addressing your lowest-scoring areas, then reassessment. Manufacturers who invest in that phase consistently run cheaper, faster projects than those who push ahead and pay for the same fixes mid-flight at crisis prices. ## Search terms erp migration risk assessment, erp implementation risk, erp project failure causes, erp migration readiness, syteline migration risk, baan to infor ln migration risk, erp risk checklist --- Talk to an engineer: https://netray.co/contact?intent=erp_ai | Machine catalog: https://netray.co/agent/catalog.json