One of the most common concerns with the implementation of new operational software is the effort involved in migrating the existing data to the new system. I just recently had an opportunity to show off how easy and immediate this is with JIRA®.
The pharma distributor used Excel to manage the records related to supplied orders. These Excel files contained information crucial to their day to day operations, along with data required to comply with the Good Distribution Practices (GDP). Some of the Excel columns were labelled:
- Product name.
- Customer name.
- Dose information.
- Accounting details: Order number, PO number, Invoice number.
- Batch number.
- Dates: initiation date, due date for supply.
The distributor was currently maintaining multiple Excel sheets like these and raised the concern that transforming them to JIRA would be a headache. The need to bring in the legacy information was driven by two motives: first, by nature, each record is part of the daily operations for a while, between the time that an order is made and the time it is fulfilled. So whenever we make the transition, if we do not migrate the operational records, someone will have to handle two different systems simultaneously - an Excel file for the older orders, and JIRA for the newly created, for at least several months. Second motive was that, having the legacy data inside JIRA would allow them to include it in their reporting, and apply some retrospective analysis about their order history. This was especially interesting for them because of JIRA’s powerful reporting options.
Happily, Excel import to JIRA is straight forward, and easy:
Step 1: Define a JIRA issue type that corresponds to each line of your Excel. In this example, we defined a new issue type for a product order, and it contained fields for each of the columns in the original Excel. So, the new issue type contained fields for Product name, Customer information, etc.
Step 2: Identify which column in your Excel should be mapped to the JIRA summary field. This field is obligatory in JIRA. We decided that the product name would be imported into the summary. We also wanted to have a dedicated product name in the issues so as to allow us, in the future, when we create new orders to give them another summary text. So we copied/pasted and created one more column in the Excel which we designated to import into JIRA’s summary field.
Step 3: Remove any lines from the Excel which are not order lines, for example - various commentary lines appearing before the table itself.
Step 4: JIRA has an easy to use import wizard. Basically you just need to indicate which field in JIRA receive each of the columns you want to import and then execute the import.
The whole process of performing the above four steps, from the moment we saw the Excel format the distributor had, until thousands of imported orders were in JIRA, took around 20 minutes. An immediate benefit to the process was the fact that the dates in the Excel spreadsheets, were mapped to dates in JIRA, and showed up immediately in JIRA’s calendar. The distributor now has an orders dashboard where the due dates for all future orders show up on the calendar.
At this stage any concerns about importing legacy data from Excel to JIRA were gone.