The company aims to enhance its offerings with AI-driven features for KaiMig by early 2025, targeting improvements in duplication detection, automated field mapping, and customer data migration automation.
Kai is the Japanese word for change, and zen means good. In the 1980s, Japanese carmaker Toyota combined the two words to give the world Kaizen, a business philosophy based on five principles for continuous improvement. In many ways, its namesake, Kaizens Group, embodies this philosophy in its products and services. Headquartered in the UK, Kaizens specializes in IFS applications, with the mission of providing seamless upgrades and driving successful implementations for end users of the enterprise software.
“Our company was founded to address the pressing need for integrated solutions that unify diverse legacy applications, connect multiple platforms and automate labor-intensive processes during ERP implementation,” says Wasantha Kumara, chief executive officer of Kaizens.
And like the business philosophy it was named after, Kaizens’ solutions and partnership with ERP vendors, partners and customers are based on five tenets that have helped improve its solutions continuously:
Principle 1: Know your customer
Vendors for any ERP system, including IFS, generally provide typical solutions that don’t always extend to further integration, especially for data. So, the question facing Kaizens when it embarked on its journey to develop its automated data migration ETL tool, KaiMig, was how it could help customers, especially large organizations, streamline and smoothen their data integration journey.
The answer lay in analyzing all the problems the Kaizens team – consisting of leaders, directors, and developers with 20+ years’ experience in this field – saw customers repeatedly facing over the past decade. “With KaiMig, we aimed to develop a one-stop solution for a company’s data migration needs,” Kumara says.
He adds that KaiMig was born out of his team’s deep expertise and experience across various industries and its foundational knowledge of IFS ERP. This positioned them to understand and address customers’ recurring challenges in their data migration journey. These include:
- A lack of integrated solutions to unify diverse legacy applications, connect multiple platforms, and automate labor-intensive processes
- Costly extensions for critical tasks such as data migration ETL, SharePoint integration, security migrations, and establishing data lakes for advanced analytics
- A smooth transition to IFS or other ERP platforms.
Principle 2: Analyze the problem
Kumara gives an example to illustrate the issues customers face with transitioning their data to new ERP systems: During the initial planning stage for a new ERP system, a customer might believe that the project will not take more than one to two years. However, it can drag on for four to five years due to data migration issues for legacy applications, especially in large, complex organizations. “Some customers have 20-25 different legacy applications that the new ERP does not support. Thus, they must call in different vendors for these applications, and even then, the extensions may or may not provide the “unique solution” that customers seek.”
Kaizens also realized that almost all ERP customers face this challenge. “We know some industry-leading tools are out there, but none of them includes data cleansing and transformation options like KaiMig does,” Kumara notes.
Principle 3: Develop the solutions
This solution’s basis was automating the data migration ETL tool to help clients achieve efficient, secure, and accurate data transfers. Additionally, the goal was to minimize operational disruptions, enhance project timelines and yield significant cost savings that could be redirected to other strategic initiatives. “With KaiMig, we achieved all these goals,” says Kumara. Today, the solution is part of the Kaizens Toolset, which, apart from KaiMig, consists of:
- KaiSec – a security migration tool designed for upgrade projects;
- KaiShare – a tool that facilitates SharePoint document migration to IFS DocMan
- KaiLake – a comprehensive data archive and reporting data warehouse.
KaiMig itself helps companies seamlessly migrate data from legacy applications whilst minimizing use of Excel files. It directly connects to the legacy application and extracts data into the KaiMig database, which is located and deployed in the cloud or on-premises in the customer environment. Moreover, the solution helps customers cleanse thousands of data duplications.
“While using Excel, users need to find the data manually, but with KaiMig, the user can define the criteria for duplication, and then the solution automatically finds it,” Kumara notes.
Principle 4: Measure progress
Today, the solution set is utilized by global giants like Maersk, which collaborated with Kaizens for a large and complex data migration project that enabled a seamless rollout across multiple regions. “Our expertise ensured the migration was efficient, accurate, and aligned with their operational needs,” says Kumara.
Given the company’s size, Maersk had initially set aside five years for the data migration project. But, thanks to KaiMig, Kumara says, the company completed the project within 14 months. “They had over 30 legacy applications, and many regions used different modules. Some had the IFS app, some had SAP modules, and some used the plant’s Data Basin. Through KaiMig, we integrated the data from all these systems,” he mentions.
Kumara mentions property care and preservation company Timberwise as another success story. He says the Kaizens Group was instrumental in Timberwise’s IFS Cloud implementation. It provided data migration, configuration and customization, reporting, IFS Mobile Work Order (MWO), and process improvements during the company’s ERP implementation journey.
According to Kumara, Kaizens has continued supporting Timberwise post-go-live to ensure smooth operations and ongoing success.
Principle 5: Empower people
The solutions developed by the company are helping customers automate their processes at every step. “KaiMig not only reduces the duplication of data but also streamlines and secures data as the solution uses its own securities and lets the project team handle the ETL process in one system instead of multiple files on their laptop,” Kumara says.
Kumara gives an example of KaiMig’s people-empowering abilities: “If an IFS legacy application has to be upgraded to IFS Cloud, the customer will want to re-implement the data [from the legacy application]. In this case, the typical ETL process can be very hard if it is done in the traditional manner,” Kumara says. “[Through KaiMig], we automatically connect to the legacy system to get the legacy template and the data structure. We then connect to the system and map that data, automatically allowing users to adjust or modify the data if they want a change.”
Now, Kaizens Group is working on developing AI-driven features for KaiMig, with a targeted release in early 2025. “These enhancements will help Kaizens consumers with AI-powered duplication detection and removal, improved automated field mapping, AI-driven transformation applications, pre-validation improvements, and automation of customer data migration’” Kumara concludes.
