Sequencing eight waves and proving the close

Turn the SLA crosswalk, the organisational decisions and the customisation triage into a sequenced load plan with four-corner reconciliation, a rehearsed cutover and a go/no-go checklist that finance will actually sign.

What you will be able to do

Introduction

Everything in this path converges here. The organisational crosswalk decided what the legal entities are; the finance design decided what the accounts and dimensions are; the posting crosswalk decided how transactions find them; the development and integration triage decided what comes with.

Before the waves: what has to be true

Three things precede the load plan, and the executive summary lists them as what should happen first.

The extraction design

The extraction strategy is worth restating because it determines whether reconciliation is meaningful.

The eight waves

The load sequence runs in eight waves, each with a gate that has to pass before the next begins.

The three families of control

The playbook groups its validation controls into three families, and each belongs at a different point.

Four-corner reconciliation

An auditable reconciliation has four corners, and a pack that presents fewer will be questioned.

Rehearsing the cutover

Mock loads prove the loads. The cutover rehearsal proves the cutover, and they are different exercises.

The go/no-go checklist

The operating-unit-to-target organisational model is signed off. An SLA translation baseline exists. Main accounts and dimensions are frozen for the mock load. Payment terms, customer groups and vendor groups are loadable in the target. Site, warehouse and costing policies are decided. Reconciliation packs and control totals are approved.

The risks worth watching

Five of the six are discovery failures rather than execution failures. They are cheap to prevent and expensive to correct, and the point at which they become expensive is the point at which the load plan starts running.

After go-live

The archive. Historical journal detail, expenditure history, asset transaction history and closed documents mostly do not belong in the live target. They belong in an archive with a defined query route and a defined retention period, and the decision to archive rather than load is what protects the target from carrying a decade of…

Knowledge check

Summary

The transition is where the design decisions are tested, and its sequence is dictated by dependency: chart and dimensions first, then master data, then open documents, then inventory, then production and projects and assets, then receivables and payables, then the opening balance, then delta and freeze.