There is no single technique in managing data that can be leveraged all the time in a typical Dynamics 365 implementation. Discipline, ownership, and a process for master data governance are critical success factors for the sustainability of a system. Data management is not a one-time affair, so it should always be closely monitored, optimized, and executed as per your plan. Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) is one of the most common approaches in data migration planning, and you will be using it in one way or the other, no matter which solution/application is in focus.

The following steps are involved in ETL:

1. Identify all the source systems, as per the data migration requirements.
2. Build data templates to extract information from the source system:
   • When volumes are high, you can leverage a SQL database as a common repository to extract the information.
   • For smaller data and configurations, you can directly leverage Excel as the mechanism.
3. Prepare for data export from the source system into the staging places.
4. Perform data cleansing and validation activities:
   • System validations and automation should be leveraged wherever you can generalize a rule for validation and cleansing. You should use it to put the staging data in a format that can be imported into the target system.
   • When human decisions are involved, then introduce manual checkpoints for data validations in the staging system, for example, mandatory data, data types, and data length.
   • Leverage the tools that are available in the Dynamics 365 solution to import data.

Now, let's learn about data mapping and transformation considerations:

• Cleanest data: If the data is stored in multiple places in a legacy system, you should pick the cleanest one to extract a copy from. Consider the update timings in the source and add dependencies in the go-live plan to get the source data updated, prior to starting the extraction.
• Business rules in transformation: Define and validate the field mapping between the legacy systems and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, along with any transformations that need to happen between the extraction and the import process. Define rules in the target system or in the source systems (for example, bad addresses and phone numbers) to enable automation and transformation as much as possible.

Leveraging the aforementioned techniques, let's evaluate the various tools and see how we can benefit from them.