Upgrading to Oracle Financials R12 at Leicestershire County Council

Leicestershire Council upgraded to R12 in March this year (2009) (from a recent re-implementation of 11i). Here’s some points I took from their presentation

Some context for Leicestershire which:

• had only very recently completed an 11i re-implementation (April 08) and they used this to do lots of data cleansing. Hence this was an interesting ‘hybrid upgrade’ in that they gained the benefits from a re-implementation then upgrade to R12.
• are one of the earliest UK adopters of R12. Many of the issues they encountered may now be resolved.
• Have 4,000 users.

Points of interest

• The open interface for importing historic invoices was problematic
• There were problems with documents sent by fax or email (these had to be sent manually for many months after go-live
• Legacy data – a key issue is what to do with legacy data
• Encumbrance reporting is very powerful and if you’re not using it you should ask yourself why not

Lessons learned

• Do trial upgrades and look very carefully at the data to ensure you haven’t got anything unexpected in your data migration (e.g. they had banks and suppliers that duplicated owing to description fields and other issues).
• Oracle’s documentation was poor and Liecestershire developed their own enhanced documentation (but Oracle’s might be better now)
• Since the system will be down for a while, there will probably be a backlog of transactions to be processed at go-live. This should be planned for.
• Oracle will give around the clock support but this will mean:
  • Your team will have to be available to respond around the clock too.
  • SR’s may get “baton passed” to and from analysts around the globe, so their may be handover irritations.
• Some issues were not fixed by a single patch but by a RUP. This has huge implications if you’ve already spent weeks on regression testing.
• If you’re going to upgrade to R12, think very carefully about it. There will be loads of issues, which will trip you up unless you have planned and have resource available.
  • You will have to work 24 X 7 for some periods.
  • Get early senior support and engage with the business early

A great presentation. The slides are pretty good and have more information (including speaker’s notes). You can get them here:

http://www.ukoug.org/assets/uploads/library/GedMossOracleSIG2009R12atLCCv041.pps or here:

http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_presentation.jsp?id=10005

This entry was posted on 16/07/2009 at 07:48 am and is filed under 11i to R12 Upgrade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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