[Geoff Fitzgerald]

Apologies but I am a new member and just working my way around how to best use the community.

We are a small NAV user but are looking to better understand the migration costs involved in moving to BC – does anyone have a template they might be able to share please?

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Geoff Fitzgerald
Armstrong Consulting Services
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[Steven Chinsky]

Geoff,

It varies depending on what version of NAV you are on, do you have customizations that need to move forward to extensions, custom reports that have to move forward, what granules you are using. The older the NAV version you will fall into a reimplementation category. This means data will migrate to BC for the Master Records (Customers, Vendor, Items, COA, etc…). Open Balances for AP/AR. GL History for a few years. Open Documents (SO/PO). These are the variables that will equate to the one-time cost to upgrade. Your Partner or a NAV/BC Partner can give you an estimate.

Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Steve

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Steven Chinsky
Manager
Wipfli
Mansfield MA
NAVUG/BC Programming Committee Member
NAVUG All-Star, Granite Award Recipient, MCP, DCMP
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[Spencer Coulter]

Geoff,

I would echo exactly what Steven responded with, there are a number of factors that can usually be worked through with access to your SQL environment + license info to get at least a ballpark figure together. That said, if you are on a fairly vanilla install the Microsoft tool to move NAV to BC is fantastic and can really cut down the cost. To counter it, the development model is drastically different so any code needs to be re-worked for the cloud option alongside ISV solutions (though if you’re version is recent the tool can bring these tables up too if done correctly).

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Spencer Coulter
Director, Business Applications

RSM US LLP
D: 515.281.9248 F: 515.471.5261
E: Spencer.Coulter@rsmus.com
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[Robert Jolliffe]

I have a general rule of thumb that I posted previously in another thread regarding “general” upgrade rules.

If your NAV has customized objects, they need to be migrated to AL code.  Excluding any 3rd party addons and excluding any .NET code that needs to be rewritten (it happens in 5-10% of cases I’ve seen) go into the development environment and search for ALL objects, with Modified = Yes.

30 Minutes per modified object is a fair estimate.  Could be 45 minutes.  Could be 15.  You could have a code unit that takes 2 days to migrate.  It’s not precise but it seems to work pretty well in the cases we’ve used.

About 8 hours of absolute time to do the upgrade if the database isn’t enormous (less than 10Gb is not too big).

Another 8 hours to do a test upgrade.

So if you had 100 modified objects, 50 hours for the code migration and 16 hours for the upgrade.  Training extra.  That would get you to a Business Central version 14 database.  From there you can migrate to the cloud – maybe another 10 hours assuming all the code moves easily to the cloud and you use the standard migration tools.

I wrote a blog about the upgrade process at SabreLimited.com.  The non-development tasks are just tedious and tricky.  The development tasks can be really hard.

The only way to give a really accurate estimate is to get a copy of the custom code in your DB and analyze it.  I created a spreadsheet that I can fill some statistics into and it gives me a really accurate estimate of the time.

Hope that helps!

-Rob

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Robert Jolliffe B.A.Sc, MCSE, MCS – NAV Manufacturing Expert
President
Sabre Limited
Cambridge
robert@sabrelimited.com
http://www.sabrelimited.com
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