Most control breaks we are called in to fix trace back to one event: an ERP migration. The new system goes live, and controls that were implicit in the old one quietly do not come across. A note on what has to survive the cutover.
Controls do not migrate themselves
Segregation of duties, approval limits, three-way matching, posting restrictions — these live in configuration and roles, not in the data you migrate. If they are not deliberately re-designed and re-tested in the new system, the migration silently loosens them. We map every key control to its new-system equivalent before go-live, not after the first bad month-end.
Protect data integrity at the boundary
The cutover itself is the highest-risk window: opening balances, master data and in-flight transactions all move at once. Reconcile the conversion to the legacy system, lock down access during the transition, and keep an auditable trail of what moved and how. Get the boundary right and the new controls hold; get it wrong and you spend a year chasing differences.
A practitioner’s note on control continuity through system change; scope the control set to your environment.