In the old days, a couple of years ago, migrating data from one business application to another usually went like this:

A manual export from the source system to spreadsheets.
A tedious manual manipulation of the spreadsheet data in place, tedious manual copying and pasting from the export spreadsheets to import template spreadsheets, or both.
A manual import to the target system.
A fervent hope that nothing broke.
Repeating the process until it worked or the team gave up in exhaustion.

Shortcomings of the Manual Migration Process

Granted, this process was an improvement over the even older process that exported data to flat (text) files, with fields delimited by commas, tab characters, pipe characters (|), or some other format. The switch from flat files to spreadsheets reduced errors, but it still had shortcomings:

Manual manipulation of spreadsheet data is still error-prone—perhaps less so than with flat file, but still too much for an efficient migration.
Shortcuts such as formulas and global search-and-replace can have unexpected (and undesired) consequences.
Copying and pasting data from the export spreadsheet to an import template also invites errors; did you copy all the data—and only the data—you intended?
Spreadsheet programs are notorious for unpleasant “features” such as trimming leading zeroes from values that appear to be numeric; for example, Zip code “02384” becomes “2384” and you might not catch it before importing.
This method cannot be used for complex data objects such as attachments and workflows.

If that weren’t enough, the sheer volume of data—hundreds of tables with hundreds of thousands of records—makes the manual process impractical at best. For ServiceNow in particular, even with a migration from one ServiceNow instance to another, a manual data migration using spreadsheets or xml is a terrible idea.

A Better Way: Precision Bridge Instance Migrator

For ServiceNow data migrations, there is a better way: the Instance Migrator tool from Precision Bridge.

Instance Migrator eliminates the laborious, error-prone manual migration process. To do this, it performs automatic exports from the source instance, applies appropriate and error-free transformations in memory, then auto-creates the required import sets and transform maps based on out-of-the-box templates to provide a robust and reliable migration whilst maintaining data integrity.

Highmetric, an elite ServiceNow partner based in New York City, needed to consolidate two ServiceNow instances into a single instance. Despite the complexity of the task and the volume of data (over 5 million records), Precision Bridge Instance Migrator saved the migration team over 700 man-hours compared with the estimated level of effort for a manual data migration.

Simplify Your ServiceNow Migration with Precision Bridge

An old-school, manual approach can derail your ServiceNow data migration project. Data migration is complex enough. Don’t get bogged down in manual processes. If you’re facing the prospect of a manual ServiceNow data migration, contact Precision Bridge today to schedule a demo of Instance Migrator.