The five phases are deliberately simple so they communicate to executive, customer, and investor audiences alike. Designate: the system is registered as a future target but still in active use. Preserve: the long, work-heavy phase — it opens with Configuration (schemas, layouts, bots, target lists, testing), runs through the Live Snapshots period, and culminates in Final Capture once the customer declares read-only. Decommission: a brief event-phase where the legacy system is shut down. Snapshot Access: the long-tail phase, where snapshots are authoritative and access can span years or decades. Disposition: triggered by Operational Sunset, when records are exported and the relationship winds down. Internally the factory tracks far richer sub-states — Configuration sub-tasks, Overlap progress, Final Capture completion percentages — which surface in the Transition Governance module but stay out of the clean five-phase narrative.