Migrating Financial Data from PeopleSoft to SAP & Coupa – Lessons Learned (Part 1)

I recently joined a high-stakes finance transformation project with the goal of migrating financial data from PeopleSoft to SAP and Coupa across 14 companies.
In just 7 months and after 2 mock tests, we had successfully completed the migration — with all data accepted by both systems on the first attempt.
It wasn’t easy. But it was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on — full of challenges, learning, and teamwork.
Let me share some of the key lessons learned — starting with the initial hurdles and how we structured our approach to make this happen.

🔧 The Challenge: Legacy Data Meets Modern Systems

At the start of the project, we quickly realized the scale of the challenge:
Data was inconsistent – supplier and customer records were incomplete or poorly formatted.
. No single source of truth – unclear scope and structure made it difficult to know exactly what needed to be migrated and how.
. Time was not on our side – with a tight deadline, we opted to clean data offline rather than delay the timeline.

The goal? Convert all critical financial data (R2R, O2C, Suppliers, Customers, Fixed Assets, Purchase Orders) into SAP/Coupa-ready formats — accurately and on time.

🛠️ Our Approach: Structure, Standardization, and Controls

I led the centralization of the entire data conversion process, coordinating across multiple functional streams (R2R, O2C, Assets, etc.) and ensuring alignment globally.

Key steps included:
. Centralized Data Repository – All data was stored and standardized in a shared SharePoint folder. No changes were allowed once finalized — ensuring consistency.
. Unified Chart of Accounts – Harmonized across entities to support global reporting and consolidation.
. Treasury Integration – Bank account data was mapped to the COA to ensure seamless integration.
. Automated Formatting – Using Excel macros and Power Query, formatting and cleansing tasks were automated to speed up the process and reduce errors.

Throughout the process, built-in quality controls at every stage — validation checks, reconciliation steps, and format verification — ensured the data met SAP and Coupa's strict requirements.

In my next post, I’ll dive deeper into one of the biggest technical hurdles we faced — SAP’s strict validation rules — and how we creatively solved them to ensure all supplier data was accepted on the first upload.

If you’re currently planning or going through an ERP migration, feel free to comment or reach out — happy to share.

#FinanceTransformation #SAP #Coupa #ERP #DataMigration #FinanceLeadership #PeopleSoft #ExcelTips #PowerQuery #CrossFunctionalTeams #DigitalTransformation #DataGovernance #ProjectDelivery