Suffolk County Council (re)implements R12 - Notes from UKOUG Presentation

20/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Suffolk County Council (re)implemented R12 in August 2008. Here’s some points I took from their presentation

Background

• Suffolk, Mid Suffolk and BT have formed a joint venture/shared service centre known as CSD/”Customer Service Direct”
• CSD have 2.900 active users

Reasons for re-implementing rather than upgrading:

• CSD wanted to :
  • change the chart of accounts (including number of segments)
  • remove legacy/historical data
  • decommission customisations
• CSD were also on 11.5.8, hence would have had to have upgraded via 11.5.10 to R12.

Tips:

• CSD eliminated potential backlog activity by paying suppliers to the end of the month in which they were re-implementing.
• CSD used AD patch to assess the affect of patches before applying
• Bug fixes were a big problem because many fixes would ‘break’ things in other areas. The wide functional scope of patches also meant a huge load on regression testing. (However it is thought that many of the problems they had with version 12.0.4 have been fixed in 12.0.6).

Good things about R12:

• BI publisher
  • “flexible, powerful too, relatively simple to use”. (Although that you can have all of this in 11i with the right patch – contact me for details).
  • “More complex documents require higher skill levels” (Again contact me if you’d like details of some great one day training courses I have delivered).
• Approval Management Engine – a comprehensive tool for managing transaction approval (I think this is in 11.5.10 too – Dave Bouskill presented on this in the 2007 conference).
• Workflow. (Again available in 11i and being replaced by BPEL).

Conclusions:

On hearing Carol’s presentation, many attendees were terrified at the thought of implementing R12. However, Carol pointed out that they were one of the earliest implementations (and had OPFSi) and that they succeeded. She was concerned to point out the hard work there was getting there. My take on that again, is that while later versions of R12 should be much better, preparation, engagement and resource availability is key to a successful implementation.

These are just from the notes I took (and I apologise for any errors or omissions). A great presentation and there’s more detail on the presentation slides which I recommend you download from UKOUG (they should be available here http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=4365 ).

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