What to bring from the old system, and what to leave

The instinct is to bring everything across. It is the wrong instinct, and it is the single most common reason a rollout runs a quarter late. Move what the next twelve months need. Archive the rest somewhere you can read it if anybody ever asks, which they will not.

Worth moving

• •The equipment list, cleaned: name, where it is, what it is, and a code you can scan
• •The preventive schedule, after the pruning conversation, not before it
• •Open jobs, all of them, because leaving them behind loses live work
• •Statutory and warranty records, which have a legal or financial life beyond the software

Worth archiving instead

• •Closed job history older than about two years, which nobody reads and which slows every import
• •Free text fields nobody agrees the meaning of
• •Users who have left, and the jobs assigned to them

Export the archive once, as a file, and store it where your records policy says. That satisfies the real requirement, which is being able to produce something if asked, without dragging a decade of mess into a fresh system.

The import order that keeps it clean

Import in this order and each step validates the one before it. Import out of order and you spend a fortnight repairing links.

• •Sites and buildings first
• •Floors, rooms and areas
• •Equipment, each one attached to a place
• •People and teams
• •Preventive schedules, each one attached to equipment
• •Open jobs last

Clean the equipment list once, properly

This is the only data job worth doing carefully, because everything else hangs off it. Three rules make most lists usable in an afternoon.

• •One naming pattern, applied everywhere, even where it looks silly
• •Every item has a location, no exceptions, even if the location is "yard"
• •Delete anything nobody can point at during a walk round

Walk the building before you trust the file

Print the list and walk one building with it. You will find equipment that was scrapped in 2019 still on the schedule, and a chiller nobody has ever recorded. Every list has both. Finding them now costs an afternoon.