Legacy CRM Migration: 178 Automations, No Export API
A decade of accumulated marketing and operational automation migrated from a legacy CRM to a modern platform, in a system that offers no way to export automation logic. 135 automations were captured through bespoke tooling and analysed individually, then consolidated: a 41-automation family collapsed to roughly four reusable parameterised templates, and workarounds built on retired third-party tools were replaced with native platform actions rather than ported forward. Every decision — merge, keep, convert, drop or supersede — recorded in a dated register with its reasoning, so the migration is auditable rather than a leap of faith.
The problem
Roughly 178 automations accumulated in a legacy CRM over about a decade — duplicates, half-finished experiments, and workarounds built on third-party tools that no longer exist. All of it had to move to a new platform. And the legacy CRM has no automation export API: you cannot get the logic out. Every automation had to be read and understood by hand.
What was built
A capture-analyse-consolidate programme:
- Capture tooling that scrapes the legacy campaign builder into structured JSON — 135 automations captured across nine functional groups.
- Logic-capture documents per group (~280 KB of analysis), so each automation's real behaviour is written down rather than inferred at rebuild time.
- Consolidation: a 41-automation family collapsed to roughly four reusable parameterised templates. Redundant and abandoned automations identified for removal rather than ported.
- Modernisation decisions: workarounds built on retired third-party tools replaced with native platform actions instead of being reproduced.
- A dated decision register (102 KB) recording every merge, keep, convert, drop and supersede decision with its reasoning.
The hard part
Not the volume — the absence of ground truth. With no export, the only source of truth is the builder UI, and the only durable artefact is what you write down. That shaped the whole approach: capture into structured data first, analyse into readable logic documents second, decide third, and record every decision with its reason so the programme is resumable across months and auditable by a client who wants to know why something was dropped.
The consolidation insight is the transferable one: a large legacy automation estate is usually not 178 distinct behaviours. It's a much smaller set of patterns, repeated with variations, plus accumulated dead weight. Finding the patterns is what makes the rebuild tractable.
What can be verified
- 135 of ~178 automations captured, analysed and classified
- nine functional groups
- ~280 KB of logic-capture analysis
- a 102 KB dated register
- consolidation and trim maps
- rebuild specifications
- 21 session handoffs and 8 end-of-day reports.
On numbers: every figure above is an artefact count or a measured technical value. No business-outcome metric, whether time saved, revenue or conversion, was captured on these engagements, so none is claimed.
On status: reflects repository evidence and platform backups, not a live systems check.