Avoiding Conversion Gotchas

Sometimes it's the simple things that trip you up. This happened to us when we were converting San Joaquin Delta College's building codes during their migration to the Kuali Financial System (KFS).

At Delta and many other institutions, building codes can contain ampersands and other special characters. KFS doesn't accept these characters in the Building Code fields. (If you're manually entering data through the UI, the system performs a validation that prevents you from entering invalid characters.) Entering special characters in these fields directly in the database causes errors, such as a PO remaining in "en route" status after approval.

After we realized what the problem was, we simply wrote a script to replace special characters with an alphanumeric before running the conversion program again. What a big difference! Now we run this script as a routine part of our process. If you're converting to KFS, you might want to do something similar to avoid holdups.

By the way, another place to be vigilant about special characters is in VNDR_TAX_NBR fields. If a vendor tax number contains hyphens or dashes, the purchase orders that include the number will go into "exception" status.

Hope this info helps some of you avoid conversion gotchas that slowed us down for awhile.

   Keith Showers
   Sr. Technical Consultant
   rSmart