When an agency decides to migrate from one AMS to another — or when an acquisition forces the issue — the focus is almost always on the technical side. Can we move the data? What's the timeline? How fast can we get live?
These are the wrong questions to lead with.
What Actually Goes Wrong
The problems in a migration rarely show up at go-live. They show up three to six months later, when someone tries to run a renewal report and finds gaps, when a client calls about a certificate that doesn't exist in the new system, or when the accounting team realizes that policy data didn't map correctly to the right division.
The Source System Problem
Most legacy AMS platforms — AMS360, Hawksoft, QQ Catalyst — have data structures that don't map cleanly to Epic's schema. Fields that exist in one system don't exist in another. Data that was loosely structured in the old system needs to be clean and consistent in the new one. Duplicates that nobody noticed in the old system become real problems in Epic's stricter environment.
A proper migration starts with a full audit of the source data before a single record is moved. What's there? What's missing? What needs to be cleaned up before it can even be imported?
Why Early Involvement Matters
The earlier a migration specialist is brought in, the better the outcome. Ideally, this happens at the proposal stage — before contracts are signed, before timelines are committed to, before anyone has told their staff what the go-live date will be.
Early involvement means realistic timelines. It means flagging the data complexity before it becomes an emergency. It means designing the Epic environment correctly the first time, not retrofitting it after go-live.