ERP consolidation case study

Consolidating four legacy ERP systems onto Infor LN Cloud.

Quick answer

This case study shows how a UK manufacturing group consolidated four legacy ERP systems onto one Infor LN cloud instance across a three-year, GBP 4.5m programme covering 220 users, data migration, cutover control and Power BI reporting continuity.

Four companies. Four different legacy ERP systems. One group that needed a single version of the truth.

£4.5mTransformation programme.
3 yearsEnd-to-end delivery.
220Users migrated and trained.
4 to 1Legacy ERPs consolidated.

The challenge

The business, a UK industrial manufacturing group, had grown through acquisition. Each site ran its own ERP, its own part numbering, its own customer and supplier records, and its own definition of what "on time in full" actually meant.

Group reporting was a monthly exercise in spreadsheet archaeology. Stock visibility across sites was effectively zero. Nobody could answer a simple question like "how much of this part do we hold across the group?" without three phone calls.

The mandate was clear: consolidate everything onto a single cloud instance of Infor LN. £4.5 million budget. Three years. 220 users across all sites.

What we did

I led the data and migration workstream end to end across the full three-year programme. That meant owning the part of an ERP project that most often sinks it: getting four incompatible sets of master data and transactional history into one coherent system, in the right loading sequence, without breaking referential integrity.

Master data rationalisation

Four item masters became one. Every customer, supplier, item, BOM and routing was cleansed, deduplicated and mapped to a single group standard before a single record was loaded.

Strict loading sequences

Business partners before orders, items before BOMs, BOMs before routings, open balances reconciled to the penny before cutover.

Repeatable load cycles

We built validated migration rehearsals so that by the time each site went live, the migration had already been run several times in full.

Cutover without stopping production

Open orders, WIP and stock balances were migrated and reconciled over cutover weekends with finance and operations sign-off before Monday opening.

The honest bit: go-live was not the finish line

The transformation went well by any reasonable measure. On budget, sites live, business running. But the biggest challenges arrived after go-live, and they were almost all data problems.

A new ERP gives you new data structures, new field names, new ways of recording the same business events. Every report the business had relied on for years stopped working overnight. Stock figures were technically accurate but nobody trusted them yet. Logistics teams could not see what they used to see.

This is the gap that kills the return on most ERP projects. The system works. The data is in. But the business cannot use it.

How we closed the gap

Day-one report continuity

Every business-critical report from the legacy systems was catalogued before cutover, rebuilt against the new Infor LN data model, and validated against legacy outputs.

Power BI for stock management

A group-wide stock visibility suite gave planners and buyers a live view of stock across all sites for the first time in the group's history.

Logistics and despatch reporting

Load planning, despatch performance and carrier analysis moved from manual spreadsheets to refreshed Power BI dashboards.

SLA and KPI tracking

Customer SLA performance, OTIF and lead-time KPIs were rebuilt with agreed group-wide definitions and one trustworthy leadership scorecard.

The results

  • Four legacy ERP systems retired, one Infor LN cloud instance live across the group.
  • 220 users migrated and trained across all sites.
  • Over £1m in additional revenue enabled through improved visibility and order management.
  • Around £300k in annual operational savings.
  • Group-wide stock, logistics and SLA reporting in Power BI from day one of each go-live.
  • Zero loss of business-critical reporting through cutover.

What this project taught us

ERP transformations do not fail at the software. They fail at the data. The selection process gets the attention, the implementation gets the budget, and the data gets whatever is left, which is why so many businesses go live and then spend two years wondering where their reporting went.

If you are planning an ERP migration, consolidation or upgrade, the questions that matter most are not about modules and licences. They are: who owns data quality, what is the loading sequence, how will referential integrity be validated, and what does reporting look like on the morning of day one?

Facing an ERP migration, consolidation or rescue?

Digital Adaption works with manufacturers on ERP migration, data quality and Power BI reporting. If you are facing a consolidation, an Infor LN project, or a go-live that left your reporting behind, we have done it before at scale.

Get in touch

Matty Hatton is the founder of Digital Adaption, an ERP and data consultancy based on the Wirral. He has spent 15 years delivering ERP transformations for manufacturers, including leading the data migration on a £4.5m consolidation of four legacy systems onto a single Infor LN cloud instance for a 220-user group. He holds an MSc in Digital Transformation and IT Strategy from Manchester Metropolitan University and is Microsoft PL-200 certified.

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