Here are a few examples of extravagant instances of retrieving data. I will retrieve your data from your system and will safely store them in Navision or Business Central – guaranteed. I am able to retrieve your data from version-controlled systems like TEXcom, FEE, Vario, Texware, or Vepos, or even batch-oriented products from the food sector like Beefware or Flagranto.
TEXcom from Prosoft, an ERP that is quite popular in the textile industry, in particular, due to its comprehensive version control: the program provides inventories in Excel in an extremely compact format. The difficulties here are that the rows with Existing merchandise Do not Have any article numbers. The versions are listed in the row above and sometimes have an article number, and sometimes they do not. Articles that start with — should be deactivated during import and negative inventories should not be imported in the first place. The stock prices should be imported as well. This way, data from other systems with versions, not only TEXcom, can be transmitted safely to Navision or Business Central.
Price lists are very easy for humans to read, but they are quite challenging for programmers. With a little clever C/Side code and some other tricks, this data will also make its way into Navision without any errors.
How do you get data from legacy systems into Navision? There is no general rule here since every transfer from system to system is different. But I’ve always managed to find a way to retrieve data from the legacy system, and I’m not afraid of going so far as to using RS232 couplers or printer emulation. With these methods, the legacy system „thinks“ that it is printing its list to a printer, as usual. I intercept this data stream and filter out the accounts, transactions, inventories, and prices that I need. Once this information is available in a text file, it can also be imported into Navision.
With this method, I can even retrieve data from an AS/400 with RPG or from a Siemens Nixdorf Quattro 8870 with Comet. Speaking of Comet: Have you ever wondered where the „funny“ function key assignments for Navision 3.53-3.56 and the Windows versions Navision 1.30, Navision 2.01 to Navision 2009R2 come from? Such as F3 = add, F4 = delete? Take a closer look at Nixdorf/Comet Business Basic. You will be amazed by how much of Navision you will find here, such as the ingenious database query loops for which the programmer basically doesn't have to do anything, the form generator, the report generator, etc. Navision actually copied quite a bit from former market leader Siemens Nixdorf/Comet. With this historic connection, it's even easier for me to convince Comet users/Business Basic users or even the modern Cross Basic users to switch over to Navision or even Business Central.
It is, of course, possible to retrieve compressed or detailed data; there's no problem at all. In my experience, however, I strongly recommend NOT mixing these two for each data set. So, either only by G/L account, customer, vendor, or the entire financial accounting of every individual available item without any compression. I also regularly find errors in the legacy system when, for example, transmitted article movements or journals are summed up and do not match the inventory of an article or account that was transmitted. I, of course, immediately add a correction loop in such cases to make the required corrections. For this reason, retrieving data from a legacy system also equates to data validation and clean-up.
A great example for this type of data retrieval is moving data from Beefware, which I worked on quite some time ago. While the inventories of the articles were correct, the article movements showed a sum that didn't match. Therefore, I fixed the incorrect items in the source during the import.