Vendors of business applications now build tools whose sole purpose is moving customers away from a competitor. They read the existing environment, map objects and fields onto the target system and transfer records automatically. An extension of such methods to ERP systems has been announced.
This shifts a factor that has quietly shaped contract negotiations for years: the effort required to leave a system at all. Anyone unable to quantify it negotiates from a weaker position.
What these tools explicitly do not handle is the revealing part. Automations, custom code, attachments and documents remain manual work. That is precisely where the main effort sits in grown landscapes. Mapping fields is diligent work a model handles reliably. Deciding whether an automation running for years gets rebuilt, replaced or dropped is a business question with an accountable owner.
More valuable than the transfer itself is therefore the first step, a complete inventory of your own landscape. It belongs before the vendor decision and it belongs to the company. Producing it with a vendor's tool hands over a blueprint before anything has been decided.