8 Lessons Learned from an SAP CRM 2005 Data Migration Project

Find out how to improve data load performance when you use the Business Application Programming Interface approach to migrate business partner data and its marketing attributes, roles, contact information, and external IDs from a legacy application into SAP CRM 2005. Learn the key items to watch out for during this cut-over activity and how to address issues that may cause poor load performance.

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Key Concept

To migrate data from a legacy system to SAP CRM 2005, you have a couple of options. You could use Data Transfer Workbench, which works best with simple data loads. Otherwise, you could use a Business Application Programming Interface approach, which is appropriate when you want to load business partner attributes separately.

For a recent client, I had to migrate business partner data from a homegrown legacy system to SAP CRM 2005. The requirement was to load business partner data, marketing attributes, external identifiers, contacts and their marketing attributes, employee relationships, and various partner functions. This involved loading about one million business partners with their various attributes in a short span of time.

The initial evaluation revealed that the Data Transfer Workbench (transaction SXDB_TOOLS) with object type BUS1006 was not a viable option because we needed to load many repeating attributes. We decided to use a Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI) approach with a custom load program to load each of the attributes separately. This option provided more flexibility in the data load process.

SAP’s benchmark for loading a business partner using a direct data load program is approximately 35,000 records into the system. In this case, the custom data load program using BAPIs was loading fewer than 5,000 records into the system. I’ll take you through the tasks we performed to improve the system performance and show you some key lessons we learned in this project.