SPAN White Paper
Oracle e-Business Suite Upgrade Oracle has taken the opportunity to upgrade its basic technology versions in order to leverage its latest technologies. In Oracle’s Release 12 of the e-Business Suite, the company has focused on making improvements in many of the foundational architectures. R12 helps organizations achieve a global view of customers and operations, assists in enhanced working methods, and, aids in simplified implementation, management and scaling up the global applications. Organizations are required to identify and prioritize the desired improvements to be included in the upgrade or post-upgrade phases. Knowledge and prior information are the keys to mitigate the risk, securing your ERP, and making the upgrade a success story. This white paper is intended for customers seeking to upgrade to the latest e-Business Suite, Release 12.1.3.
Oracle Support Consideration For customers who own Oracle licenses, Oracle supports three kinds of support for the e-Business suite ☑☑ Premier Support ☑☑ Extended Support ☑☑ Sustaining Support Premier Support and Extended Support are provided for the previous versions for a limited period. Once it expires, Oracle provided Sustaining Support, which includes – ☑☑ New upgrade scripts ☑☑ New tax, legal, and regulatory updates ☑☑ Certification with new Oracle products ☑☑ Certification with new third-party products / versions ☑☑ New updates, fixes, security alerts, data fixes, and critical patch updates
Sustaining Support Exception Oracle announced partial exception for the Sustaining Support of R 11.5.10 from December 2013 to December 2015. During these 2 years, Oracle will continue to provide ☑☑ Severity 1 fixes ☑☑ Critical patch updates ☑☑ Updates in payroll regulatory taxes for the UK Tax Year (April 6, 2013 – April 5, 2014) This permits customers maintain stable operations even while executing and completing an upgrade to R12.1 or 12.2. These apart, Oracle will not provide Non-Severity 1 bug fixes for R11.5.10. As Oracle’s Fusion Applications are still maturing, challenges such as sizable infrastructure footprint are required to run the software. Hence, your organization must position its enterprise application in a manner in which it becomes easy to adopt Oracle Fusion applications. Once on Release 12.1 or higher, you will be well-positioned to add value to your solution by implementing additional e-Business Suite modules or by co-existing with other products, including Oracle Fusion Applications.
When to Consider an Upgrade? All the 11i customers can consider upgrading to a later version prior to December 2015. Businesses that intend to continue to receive maximum Oracle app support or those that wish use the latest version of security patches for compliance reasons (e.g. PCI), should consider an upgrade. You can also consider an upgrade ☑☑ Before your current version is out of support. ☑☑ When the risk of staying on your current platform outweighs the effort & cost related to the upgrade. ☑☑ Before you expand your business footprint on your current application suite. ☑☑ When you need to take advantage of a new functionality to maintain your competitive advantage.
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Business Value Consideration While Upgrading to Release 12 Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12 is designed to lower costs and increase performance. In order to simplify, standardize and centralize the operations in an ERP Suite, the R12 provides business benefits to all the customers regardless of the industry and company size. R12 gives a competitive edge over other similar organizations in the industry and assists in ☑☑ Standardized and centralized key accounting policies across the entire enterprise
with sub ledger accounting.
☑☑ Faster month-end closing with Ledger & Ledger Sets functionality. ☑☑ Banks and bank accounts are centrally managed and accessed across Oracle
applications using TCA.
☑☑ Payments are centrally disbursed and captured with Oracle Payments. ☑☑ eBTax - provides infrastructure for transaction tax knowledge management and
delivery using configurable and scalable global system architecture.
☑☑ Advanced Global Intercompany System for improving period-end reconciliation. ☑☑ End users will experience dashboards, step-by-step check lists, wizard-like pages,
and consolidated single-page setups (ex: collections, payments, accounting setup and tax pages).
☑☑ XML Publisher-based reporting enables simplified reporting and supports various
publishing styles (e.g. pdf, MS Word, XML, etc.). Oracle BI Publisher is an easy-to- use solution for formatting and publishing reports.
☑☑ Replace complex customizations with standard functionality using enhanced R12
features, which lowers compliance costs.
☑☑ Strengthen your latest technology stack with advanced overall system capabilities
for platforms, databases, applications and integrations.
☑☑ Upgrading to R12 will give an excellent opportunity to phase-out legacy platform.
Removing customizations during an upgrade project will also reduce your future Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through lower costs of maintaining your application, lower development costs and future upgrade costs. Oracle e-Business Suite Upgrade
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Approach for a Successful Release 12 Upgrade Enterprise businesses must be well comprehended to be able to clearly map it with ERP Modules that have to be implemented. The deriving factor behind our upgrade should be very clear. It could be enhanced functionality, highest level of product support, scalability, reducing our cost of ownership, and adopting the latest technology stack for a futuristic approach.
Phases of an Upgrade Project Evaluate the Upgrade Project Planning an Upgrade Technical Upgrade
11 i
End User Training
R12
Functional Set-up and Testing Production Environment
Evaluate the Upgrade Project In the evaluation phase, you need to consider factors such as support timelines, functional capabilities, technical infrastructure and underlying business needs. Analyze and evaluate your existing resources like infrastructure and key business areas. Further, it is also important to perform a functional evaluation of your organization’s current application environment and analyze the existing gaps across your Oracle EBS suite of applications. Upgrading to R12 facilitates revisit your organization’s key business priorities, issues and challenges. It is critical to conduct an assessment of your current application usage, identify key processes, application issues, analyze manual process steps, third party components, and review existing CEMLIs (Configurations/Customization, Extension, Modification, Localization and Internationalization, and Integration) that may be totally removed or will require updates due to enhancements resulting from the upgrade. Your application specialists should conduct a thorough review of Release 12 enhancements, module by module, by understanding new features and process changes that come by default, along with optional new features that you may want to implement. These can have a positive impact on the business value. Planning an Upgrade Based on the output of the evaluation, define the project’s scope and create a project plan. The project scope should have upgrade objectives, business decisions regarding any new functionality/features to be implemented, changes in the business processes, impact of the upgrade on customizations, interfaces, and integrations on your current environment. The project should also talk about the number of instances needed, business users’ involvement during the project, and consider all assumptions in various project phases. Communication with key stakeholders in the upgrade plan is imperative to success. Plan your resources and project team composition as well. Customizations that can be eliminated or simplified due to R12 functionality and business process changes also need to be clearly identified. Oracle e-Business Suite Upgrade
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Technical Upgrade The Release notes from Oracle Meta link is the best starting point for reviewing the technical upgrade requirements. Based upon the release documents, you must create a detailed technical upgrade document for your organization. Infrastructure or hardware upgrades, or changes to the database also need to be considered. In addition, system downtime and its impact on various systems and operations must be appropriately understood. Perform a test upgrade on a cloned instance of your production environment to gain experience. Document various issues faced and their resolutions during the upgrade. Take regular backups of the systems so that you can restore to a specific point during the subsequent upgrade steps. All the CEMLI components must be retrofitted in accordance with the new application functionality and R12 data model. Custom codes must be identified and its retrofit efforts must be tracked during the project. The technical upgrade phase also includes conference room pilots and various testing rounds. Extensive testing has to be performed to ensure that they have not been affected by the changes to the tables/APIs etc. Functional Set-up and Testing It is a must to understand what business logic and functionality is needed to incorporate the new features of R12. The impact of new features such as Trading Community Architecture, Payments & e-Business Tax, and influence on tax codes must be well recognized. A decision has to be made and accordingly, the selection criteria and parameters have to be defined for moving your customers, suppliers or supplier sites into a trading community architecture. A robust testing strategy needs to be developed and a number of test rounds and types of testing must be carried out, with an overall goal of performing end-to-end testing of various business flows and scenarios. Functional testers have to perform transactions in various business areas to validate the functional setups during the conference room pilot (CRP) phase. Modify your test scripts according to business processes and compare the results. Once you are sure about the setups, business users should be included in the testing phase as soon as possible and they must ultimately decide if the tests are accepted or more commonly known as User Acceptance Testing. End User Training Provide training to end-users about the new features, business processes and other changes in the R12 version. The best way to reduce the number of issues you have to track, research, and resolve is to train your users at an optimal time in the upgrade process. Proper training will give your users enough information to distinguish issues that result from a new version or intended changes in the set ups. However, it is a fact that most users will prefer to be trained near to the Go-Live date so that they remember what they have learned and apply that knowledge during their routine operations. Production Environment An organization should create an upgraded production environment for business users. A step-by-step Go-Live plan that includes all the technical and functional upgrade steps should be created and executed. Emphasis should be on reducing the production outage window, which could be achieved by a detailed, well-planned and coordinated production upgrade plan. The Applications DBAs must be aware of various techniques that might be useful in reducing the downtime. Further, ensure to have all the teams on standby so that when issues arise, they can be addressed immediately.
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Conclusion A thorough pre-study or assessment would be helpful in preparing a business case for the funding requirements, support and visibility of the upgrade project needed in your organization. It can exactly tell you the project benefits and business value over the costs to justify upgrading your enterprise applications. A ballpark estimation for the project timeframe and a project plan would be the outcome of this assessment and, it can prove to be vital in reducing the overall project risk. You need to map your existing business infrastructure and other enterprise resources with the resources needed for the upgrade project. It is important that you establish a timeline that allows you to complete the upgrade successfully.
About the Author Hardeep Singh is a Lead Oracle consultant with SPAN Infotech (India) Pvt. Ltd., and has around 8 years of experience in implementing, customizing, upgrading and supporting Oracle ERP. His educational profile includes a degree in Bachelor of Technology and a Master of Diploma in Finance Management. His in-depth knowledge extends across the Healthcare & Supply Chain domains. He is an Oracle e-Business Suite 12 Financial Management-certified implementation specialist and also has to his credit strong experience in executing Oracle projects.
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