Monday, October 29, 2012

How to import sales data?


One of the most boring jobs in CRM 2011 deployment process is to import the data from old systems. I think the most complicated section is to import sales data. The import process is straight forward and you should follow some simple steps:
  1.  Export data from the old systems. You should consider the required fields of the CRM 2011.
  2. The most required and manual part of this process is data cleaning. Although systems use various validations, but some kind of dirty and invalid data could be found everywhere.
  3. Prepare a map to import data. Here, you have to specify a corresondence between the exported data fields and system fields of each entity.
  4. Excell files (.csv) are the most desired format of the export and import types.

Following are the notes one has to consider importing sales data (Opportunities, Quotes, Orders …):
  •  First of all the head of the entities have to be imported.
  •  Products of each entity are the second step.
  • If the products are not pre-defined, they should be imported as “write-in product”. This type has no units.
  • The last step is to change the status of the imported objects. Workflows or dialoges could be used for this step.
  • The objects should be imported by the order of the sales flow. For example, first the opportunities, then the quotes should be imported to avoid miss-linking.
  • After the completeion of each import job, check the errors and partial failures to prevent reimporting.

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