Hi everyone,
We’re currently preparing for a NAV to Business Central upgrade, and I’d really appreciate insights from anyone who has gone through the process.
We’re using Dynamics NAV 2016, and planning to upgrade to Business Central (Cloud or On-Prem still undecided). While we’ve reviewed Microsoft’s official documentation, I’d like to hear some real-world challenges you’ve faced during this transition.
Specifically, I’d like to know:
- What unexpected issues came up during the upgrade process?
- Were there any data migration or customization challenges?
- How did you handle third-party extensions or ISV solutions?
- Any performance or compatibility issues post-upgrade?
- If you could go back, what would you do differently?
Also, did you use any tools, partners, or checklists that helped streamline the upgrade process?
Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences. I’m sure this discussion will help many others planning a NAV to Business Central upgrade.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Jack - What is always a challenge when moving from an older version of NAV to the cloud BC is not so much the mechanics to upgrade but based on the latest BC is there opportunity to look at reimplementing. What I mean by this is I have observed that companies do not invest dollars just to get to the cloud but to leverage BC to improve processes or save time to stay competitive.
During the upgrade find a few of those process improvements that make a difference that can be part of the upgrade to support the investment to get to the cloud. Realizing that other process improvements are a phase 2 after upgrade.
Use Your partner who knows your current processes from at least a high to moderate level should be able to
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Few of the tricky challenges are quite often doing an upgrade from NAV to BC world and it’s not upgrade specific but it depends upgrade to upgrade. You might face something which I never faced and vice versa. How I have normally done is
- Separate all Addons altogether.
- Take care of all the customizations separately into an extension.
- Make sure and the tricky one is to take care of base to base changes, there could be some customization which you did but that’s now added by MS or something similar in BC world.
- Something might be deleted or obsolete in BC which was there in NAV so be extremely careful how you are taking care of those changes. Don’t try to achieve them as a customization.
- Exactly same may happen on table level as well.
- Once you are done with the schema building then go for data migration which is going to take quality time as all app attachment to SQL will be processed.
Jack,
Several of your questions will be specific to your organization. You may be in a position where several ISV’s could be potentially outdated or BC picks up the process that an ISV once filled.
Data Migration is going to be incredibly important and would need reviewed if your system is highly customized. As John mentioned, there are several new features that could result in a review of your current processes, where a partner is helpful.
If I or my team can be of any assistance, feel free to reach out.
Brendan
We had a lot of performance challenges after upgrading from NAV2017 to BC23 and most of them is due to keys and SIFT missed during the upgrade process especially in our customisation to handle Contracts and contract orders. As you may know you can not create index and SIFT combining standard fields and customised fields. Many of them boils down to this. Consultants from SQL Mantra Tools has helped us to identify performance issues and helped us to fix. There is a nice article specifically explaining this in their performance blog. Visit SQL Mantra Tools - The Performance Tuning Experts for Business Central for more detail.