16/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Oracle revealed that first year Extended Support fees will be waived for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i Release 10 (waived through November 2011).

One of the key reasons for upgrading to R12 by November next year (2010) is to avoid the addition of 10% on the support charge as the product goes into extended support. Oracle have just announced (May 4^th) that while 11.5.10 will go into extended support in November 2010, it won’t cost any more than normal (”premier”) support.

It sounds to me that, if you don’t need the extra functionality of R12, then there’s no hurry to upgrade.

See here for more information on the announcement:

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/services/support/idc-extended-support.pdf

see here for details of premier Vs extended support

http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html

Posted in 11i to R12 Upgrade | Print | 1 Comment »

16/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

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

Posted in 11i to R12 Upgrade | Print | 1 Comment »

15/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

I attended three very good presentations at the recent UKOUG event. Here’s a quick summary of my understanding of the issues regarding re-implementation (two councils) Vs upgrade (one council (and that was really an re-implementation))

The features of an upgrade are:

• All your data and KFF structure (chart of accounts) will be migrated.
• Processes will be migrated
• Your instance will be unavailable during the upgrade process which could take several days (six for one council)
• You should do several rehearsals first (eight rehearsals by one council)

The features of a re-implementation are:

• The system does not have to be taken down for long and cut over can be staged by module.
• Data cleansing and migration is a big task, but can be done over time (e.g. you can leave the final month’s data to final cut-over)
• Most (but no all) API’s and open interfaces work.

My “off the cuff” conclusion is that you should re-implement if

• you want to adopt the R12 business processes,
• you’re concerned about having your system unavailable for some days
• you want to change your chart of accounts, KFF’s, or clean up or purge old data

You should upgrade if:

• you have a recent clean implementation of 11i
• a longish period of system downtime is not a major issue.

I’m sure there are plenty of other issues but those are the ones I noted and I’ll try and add further posts on these – please contribute if you have any views (such as how the decision is affected by the level of customisations.

The presentations can be found here: http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=4365 (you will need your UKOUG login in to download the slides).

Posted in 11i to R12 Upgrade | Print | 1 Comment »