When using Project Management Software to manage manufacturing process within your facility or at a job site, it’s sometimes necessary to import sales orders, sales line items or, in situations involving single large projects such as shipbuilding or bridge construction, single overall timelines. Importing data from other sources to gain access to these items can range from simplistic to being fairly complex. It’s important to note however that rarely is it impossible to access the data from other sources.

In situations involving single large projects, an overall timeline may have been developed in software packages intended for use in offices. The timeline may exist in a spreadsheet, a small macro-powered database, or possibly a smaller office-style project management software package. Importing data from these formats into a larger, custom-designed Project Management Software system is relatively simple.

Importing data from larger database can be fairly simple if the database is of the same type or brand as used within the Project Management Software system. This also holds true for larger databases that are popular and commonly used for these types of systems as the developers of these brand-name database tend to keep the structures of their databases open.

Proprietary databases can be more difficult. What’s needed to connect to these databases is what’s called an “ODBC (open database connectivity) connection string”. This single line of plain text will allow the developers of your Project Management Software system to read directly from these proprietary databases to import the data into the new system. In a few cases the engineers of these proprietary databases would rather not allow this type of access, at which point another method must be discovered.

Importing data from legacy databases into a new Project Management Software system can run from the simple to the difficult. But even if it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean it cannot be accomplished.