Migrating to another platform

Hi Simon

We have literally just done this and moved from learner entry tool to APTEM.  It didn't go well, I had lots of missing learners in my R02 return and we subsequently decided to roll back both learner entry tools to R13 and R01 and re-enter all achievements and withdrawals/breaks in learning, whilst using the new system for learners onboarded since August.  In hindsight we probably should have waited until after R14 :).  It's caused a lot of heartache, stress and much more work!

I'm currently using filemerge and have managed to merge two ILRs successfully and upload R03 without errors.

In terms of pitfalls, my experience was with late notified achievements and an algorithm which needed amending within APTEM as it didn't recognise that it should take the later date of either last date in learning or achievement date so I had a number of standard learners who finished learning and moved to Gateway at the end of July but the achievement date was in August.  I was expecting payment in R02 as they were late notified but in fact the learners didn't appear in R02 at all because of the algorithm thing.  I think that is worth addressing with your software people.  It's all very lovely doing a batch file export and just selecting the relevant year but if you've got learners missing it sets off alarm bells at ESFA.  I had a long exchange of emails with my partnership manager explaining why so many learners had literally dropped off the submission.

Happy to chat through anything with you if you think that might be useful.

Sue

Hi Simon,

My advice is that you should do it in one operation, export data and then import in, you can then check that a specific ILR from both systems match and you have not lost any learners.

HTH

Thank you Sue that is really helpful. Glad to hear the merge tool works ok, we have trialled it with a few ILRs but both from the same supplier so I was a bit worried about putting 2 through from different systems. 

We only have 2 thousand to migrate so no pressure!!

I think we've had a chat about this, but on a very basic level, making sure the learner refs in the new system are entirely different from the old one is always a good idea!

Also, if you *can* import the old learners into the new system at some point, it will be less hassle than possibly dual running for two years! The previous learner ref field is very useful in these circs.

Other than that, just paying very close attention to how many learners you're expecting in a file to make sure no one gets lost. No real short cuts to that I'm afraid...

Thanks Steve

Yes I still have your notes from before. We are moving learners over to the new system who have an end date after 31st Dec as well as suspended learners so the remaining ones won't be in the old system for too long. 

Noted about the ref numbers too. Do you mean the learners we are migrating across should have different ref numbers in the new system? 

Much appreciated