Replacing Salesforce, SAP, and Workday: What Actually Happens in Week 1

The Fear Is the Product

Every enterprise software vendor knows that switching costs are their real moat. Not the product. Not the features. The sheer organizational dread of migrating. They've spent decades cultivating this fear: complex data models, proprietary APIs, custom objects that only work in their ecosystem.

It works. Gartner reports that 78% of enterprises cite "migration complexity" as their primary reason for not evaluating alternatives. Not satisfaction with the current vendor. Not price. Fear of the move itself.

So let's kill the fear with specifics. Here's exactly what happens when an enterprise replaces Salesforce, SAP, or Workday with an Own360 deployment. Eight weeks. Four phases. No magic, no hand-waving.

The 8-Week Deployment Framework

Weeks 1-2: Discovery and Data Audit

Week 1 is not about technology. It's about understanding your organization's actual usage patterns versus what you think they are.

We start with a data audit. For a typical Salesforce migration, this means cataloguing every object, custom field, workflow rule, validation rule, Apex trigger, and Flow. The average Salesforce org has 847 custom fields. Most companies actively use fewer than 200. The rest is technical debt accumulated over years of "quick fixes" by departed admins.

The discovery phase produces three artifacts:

1. Data inventory: Every entity, relationship, and custom field with usage frequency
2. Process map: Every automated workflow, approval chain, and notification trigger
3. Integration map: Every inbound and outbound data flow, API connection, and webhook

Simultaneously, we provision infrastructure. Own360 deploys on your cloud account (AWS, Azure, GCP) or on-premise. The base platform spins up in under 4 hours via Terraform. By the end of Week 1, you have a running instance ready for configuration.

Weeks 3-4: Schema Mapping and Data Migration

This is where most migrations fail. Not because the technology is hard, but because nobody invests enough time in schema mapping, the translation layer between the source system's data model and the target system's data model.

Salesforce uses a multi-tenant metadata-driven architecture. Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, Cases. OwnCRM uses a single-tenant relational model with the same logical entities but cleaner relationships. The mapping is not 1:1, but it's well-defined.

Migration is a data transformation problem, not a technology problem. Get the mapping right, and the rest is automation.

The migration engine handles: master data (accounts, contacts, products), transactional data (opportunities, orders, cases), historical data (activities, emails, notes), and metadata (custom fields, picklist values, record types).

Validation is continuous. Every migrated record is hash-verified against the source. Discrepancies flag automatically. By Week 4, you have a validated dataset in OwnCRM with full historical fidelity.

What Migrates: The Specifics

Weeks 5-6: Workflow Configuration and Integration

With data migrated, Weeks 5-6 focus on rebuilding your business logic. This is where Own360's architecture advantage shows: because OwnApps share a unified data model through OwnCentral, cross-module workflows that required complex integration in the SaaS world become native configuration.

Example: a Salesforce-to-NetSuite integration that took your team 6 weeks to build and breaks every quarter? In Own360, it's a workflow rule that connects OwnCRM to OwnERP natively. Same data layer. No middleware. No API rate limits.

What About Our Customizations?

This is the question every IT leader asks. The answer depends on the type of customization:

• Configuration-level customizations (custom fields, layouts, workflow rules, validation): these migrate directly. Own360's schema is flexible enough to accommodate any field structure.
• Code-level customizations (Apex, ABAP, Fiori): these get rewritten. Not ported. Rewritten in modern, maintainable code that runs natively on the platform. This is actually a feature, not a bug. Most enterprise custom code is 5-10 years old and nobody understands it anymore.
• Integration customizations (middleware, iPaaS, custom connectors): most become unnecessary because OwnApps share a data layer. The 30% that remain get rebuilt as OwnCentral webhook configurations.

Weeks 7-8: UAT and Go-Live

Week 7 is all about user acceptance testing. Not synthetic test cases written by the implementation team, but real users doing real work in parallel with the existing system.

We run a parallel operation: both systems active, same data flowing into both, users working in both and comparing results. This eliminates the "big bang" risk. If something is wrong, you catch it in parallel, not in production.

Week 8 is cutover. DNS changes, SSO reconfiguration, and decommissioning the old system's write access (read access stays for 90 days as a safety net). The typical cutover window is 4-6 hours on a Saturday. By Monday morning, users log in to the new system.

Hypercare runs for 2 weeks post-go-live: dedicated support, daily check-ins, rapid issue resolution. The average ticket count in Week 1 post-go-live is 23 per 100 users. By Week 2, it drops to 6. By Week 4, it's at baseline.

The Real Objections, Addressed

"Our Salesforce org is too complex"

We've migrated orgs with 2,400 custom fields, 180 workflow rules, and 45 Apex triggers. Complexity is a function of documentation, not impossibility. The discovery phase exists precisely to map this complexity before touching a single record.

"We can't afford downtime"

The parallel-run approach means zero downtime. Both systems are operational simultaneously during Weeks 7-8. The cutover itself is a DNS-level switch, not a data migration. Sub-hour cutover windows are standard.

"What if we need to roll back?"

The old system stays in read-only mode for 90 days. Full rollback capability exists throughout. We've never needed to execute a full rollback, but the safety net is there. Every enterprise demands it, and they should.

The scariest part of migration is the two weeks before Week 1. Once you're in it, it's just a project with a plan.

Why 8 Weeks Instead of 18 Months

Traditional enterprise migrations take 12-18 months because they're fighting integration complexity. When you replace Salesforce but keep SAP and Workday, you're rebuilding every integration point between them. That's where the time goes.

Own360 migrations take 8 weeks because you're not just replacing one system. You're deploying a unified platform where all modules share a data layer. There are no integration points to rebuild because there are no integration points. CRM, ERP, HRMS data lives in OwnCentral. The modules read from and write to the same source of truth.

Eight weeks. Not because we cut corners, but because the architecture eliminates the work that made migrations take 18 months.