05/10/2009 by Simon Tomey.

I came across this excellent thread in a Linked in group. There are some great observations and I’ve extracted it here for your reading pleasure. Click on the link and join the group yourself to contribute.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=87360&discussionID=7245014&sik=1254740399769&trk=ug_qa_q&goback=%2Eana_87360_1254740399769_3_1

ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY SALES AND MARKETING CONSULTANT

What are your experiences?

At eprentise we’re interested in your experiences upgrading from 11i to R12. How did you scope the effort? Have you tested the upgrade? Have you completed the project and gone live on R12? How did it go?

Have you reimplemented? Defined as a fresh R12 and data migration from one or more 11i instances using public interfaces and custom data loads. Did you estimate scope accurately? What drove that decision? Is the project in process or have you gone live? What are the pros/cons to look out for in the project?

IT DIRECTOR - FINANCE

We have upgraded from 11i to R12… Reimplementations (I have heard) have gone smoother than upgrading - can not substanciate that. Some Advice… watch out for AP - there are huge changes and a lot of “bugs” in the product! I would suggest 12.0.5 or later version where more fixes have been applied. Could write a novel on how the upgrade went!

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS CONSULTANT (ORACLE APPS FUNCTIONAL) ORACLE PARTNER

I’ve heard re-implementations are smoother than upgrades, but also heard of an organisation that did a very big upgrade (and from 11.5.9) and it went OK.

The UKOUG ( http://www.ukoug.org/ ) have had a number of presentations on this and I’ve written about them in my blog (here if you’re interested http://blog.belife.co.uk/category/11i-to-r12-upgrade/ ). I haven’t written up the upgrade presentation yet, but will do soon.

 CONTROLLER BETWEEN JOBS

Unless you really need the SLA functionality in R12, I recommend staying with 11i for as long as possible.

PROJECT MANAGER/SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT AT ORACLE CORPORATION SINGAPORE PTE LTD

I was in an upgrade to R12 project. Nightmarish. Literally hundreds of patches then and still had problem closing the subledgers; AP has the most problem but AR is not bug free either. FA also had some issues. Many related to the change to SLA.

DIRECTOR AT VEDAS CONNECTIONS LTD

Before you upgrage (whichever route) consider very carefully two things:

1 - does r12 provide you with any additional functionality that you need, and

2 - What happens from a corporate governance point of view to you being on the latter stages of the Oracle Support cycle - particularly when sustaining support kicks in and you dont get the statutory patches for HR/Payroll

If you decide to adopt r12 then take the opportunity to eliminate as many customisations as possible, use XML Publisher to replace custom reports, have a very good look at your data - employees, customers, suppliers and banks as the way r12 holds this data is different from 11i. Ask youself if I was to design my erp again would i design the same environment that i already have? and i am sure you have many questions of your own.

Only when you have your own answers can you decide which is better for you. As you can see from other comments each path will have its ups and downs some which will be transient (many patches) whilst others will be permanent (inadequate design). And finally you also have 12.1 available which should be more stable than earlier versions

SNR ORACLE CONSULTANT, FUJITSU

I’ve managed an upgrade from 11.5.8 to R12 (HR/PAY only) which completed March 2008 - it was quite a bumpy ride but we got there in the end, and in time to process the UK End of Year/Start of Year successfully. I have to say that areas we were concerned about in the beginning (customisations) didn’t cause any problems but patching was a headache and ended up in a lot of sleepless nights!

In retrospect, it was easier for us to upgrade so I’m confident we made the right decision, and I also think it would have been too expensive to reimplement for this particular client. I can however see the benefits in reimplementing - especially if the design of your first Oracle solution was based on what you’ve used for years, rather than redesigning business process to get the best out of the functionality.

CONSULTANT/TECH LEAD HRMS

I have done the migration from 11.5.9 to R12 (HR) it was quite smoth with some of exceptions.Need to test thoroughly all the interfaces after applying the patches

to make sure everyting is working as expected.In case there are multiple instance from which you are going to collect the data and conversion then combined with upgrade is going to take much more time than expected .

You may need to watch outr for additional requirement from users and check if the oracle provides the solution for it before giving commitments as some of the additional features as all are not provided by oracle as some features are under development.Watch out for reports migration and any third party softwares you might be using.

ORACLE FINANCIALS SOLUTION ARCHITECT/PM

Due to the changes in the functional structures in Financials you need to weigh up upgrade vs re-implement. Key areas are SLA, Ledgers/Ledger sets/Legal Entity/TCA/Bank Model.

Consider the following

- What new functionality do I want to leverage in R12

- What customisations have I got and what can be replaced with new functionality and how much work is involved in making the new functionality work

- How much business change has there been since my original implementation - and as is would the set up work with R12

Much of the new functionality hangs off the new Legal Entity structures and as such you need to understand how your current set up upgrades into the new structure and how much post upgrade work would be required to ensure R12 use is maximised.

The early R12 release were very buggy, however 12.1.1 does seem much more stable.

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22/09/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Upgrading to R12 (rather than re-implementing) seemed rare, so it’s great to hear of Messier Dowty’s experience. This was particularly interesting as they upgraded from 11.5.9. Here are the notes I took.

Background to Messier Dowty and the upgrade

• If you’ve ever flown then you’re life has depended upon them (they make landing gear).
• EBS is a core application, has 150 customisations and needs to be available 24/7 (thus have RAC).
• They chose Oracle Consulting to perform the upgrade.
• They were on 11.5.9 (which left premier support in June 08).

The upgrade experience:

• Preformed after four trials (they hoped for only three).
• End to end testing was made difficult because of the way R12 handled prior processes. Some transactions also got “stuck” in interfaces.
• Testing was made difficult because when the DBA started all concurrent processes (as he was supposed to do) it changed the status of all transactions.
• Go-live happened over a three day weekend. Users were kicked off at 4pm on Thursday then were able to get back on Monday morning.
• Achieved 98% availability.
• Changes in the GL tables mean that sub ledger detail reporting doesn’t work properly (suggestion from the floor to use BIP data templates see http://blog.belife.co.uk/2009/08/03/data-templates/).

Particular issues to consider if going from 11.5.9 to R12

• Various modules don’t upgrade very well. This includes Sub Ledger Accounting, EBus Tax and payments.
• Sub Ledger Accounting descriptions didn’t work.
• E Bus tax doesn’t work in the same way as an implementation when you do an upgrade. They needed one full time person just to look after this area. Tax groups were a particular issue.
• Intercompany invoices didn’t work because of a security issue (relating to a change from 11.5.9 to 11.5.10) and they had to do a customisation

Lessons learned:

• Use of Oracle Consulting allowed direct access to the support and development teams, who made special changes for Messier Dowty for Supply chain issues which could have otherwise prevented go-live.
• Beware of API’s – they might look like they are working but deeper investigation is required
  (Leicestershire Council had a similar experience - see lessons learned at http://blog.belife.co.uk/2009/07/16/upgrading-to-oracle-financials-r12-at-leicestershire-county-council/)
• Plan your testing with respect to prior processes and transaction status. Test as much as you can. Even very obvious things can get missed.
• MOAC* isn’t optional. You’ll need to configure it.
• If you’re going from 11.5.9 to R12 beware of a number of changes from 11.5.9 to 11.5.10 which won’t be well publicised/well known for the R12 upgrade path. These could get overlooked and trip you up
• An upgrade is perceived as much cheaper than a re-implementation.
• Many users will comment “It’s blue”!

Get the slides here http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_presentation.jsp?id=10096

Note * MOAC:

IF you don’t know what MOAC is then (I quote) “Multi-Org or multiple organization access (MOAC) is basically the ability to access multiple operating units from a single application responsibility. In Release 11i, when one had to enter or process data for multiple operating units, one had to login to different responsibilities because each responsibility could only access one operating unit…In Release 12 … [you can] create a Security Profile and assign as many operating units as you required.” see http://oracler12.blogspot.com/2007/01/moac-whats-buzz-all-about.html.

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21/09/2009 by Simon Tomey.

I think the best way to get to grips with R12 is have a play with it (apart from implementing it that is). There’s a few providers who run a instance and let you log in remotely, however, there’ a limit to what you can do and the instances get refreshed frequently, so it’s better to get your own instance.

Check out Richard Byrom’s blog for details including how to get your own small footprint instance for under £1k.
http://www.oracleappsblog.com/index.php/weblog/oracle-applications-ebs-on-a-laptop-desktop-or-server-for-11i-or-r12/ (Richard Bryrom is a great friend of mine, run’s the UK’s top blog and is an associate of BeLife - see http://www.oracleappsblog.com/index.php).

One of the products mentioned is from AppsDBA. I’ve used some of their products and can recommend them.
http://www.appsdba.co.uk/products_r12.html

The one I’ve found best for me is 11i and R12 on a laptop.
You can also get a VM (virtual machine) version of R12, but I found this slow on a laptop. (It comes supplied with a external HDD, but USB was too slow for me. You can load it onto your internal HDD, but then there seems to be a conflict of having your main apps and VM running on the same disk. It is fine though running on a dual core 3.5 GHz with 8Gb RAM (64 bit) and two internal HDDs)

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