Time to consider upgrading Oracle EBS 11i to R12

Premier support for Oracle E-business Suite 11i ends in November 2010. Extended support fees have been waived until November 2011 if you choose to wait to upgrade. If you haven't already planned for it, you need to start planning your upgrade or you will have to pay Extended support fees after November 2011. Systems  must be on minimum patch levels to continue to on Extended support (New Minimum Patching Baselines for E-Business Suite 11i Extended Support).

Organizations should start planning (and budgeting) for their upgrade now if they are still running R11i. Understanding all of the factors invloved in an upgrade are critical to properly plan and budget for this type of project. Some key factors to consider are:

• Number and complexity of customizations
• Testing and support staff availability
• New features and functionality
• Corporate initatives
• Ability to manage the project internally
• New hardware/software requirements 
• Consulting needs

Once a strategy and plan for the upgrade are in place, calculate your costs, both internally and externally.  Do not underestimate the size and complexity of the upgrade.  Even if the implementation in your organization is considered 'vanilla', there are still many factors to consider.  Many application changes have occurred in R12 that may require system or business process changes in your organization.

This is also a perfect time to review test plans and testing strategy.   Many of those test plans are outdated and inaccurate since they were intially created.  Many organizations have testing documentation for their initial implementation and then never look at them again.  Now is the time to dust those off and update them accordingly.  Create a plan to keep them up to date as the business and systems change so that during the next cycle less time can be spent on testing documentation and more time can be spent on the important stuff like testing.

Infotegrity can help you with your planning and execution of the upgrade as well as provide details on how much extended support may cost you if you choose to delay your upgrade past November 2011.  Please Contact us for more information.

Best of luck.

White Paper Available - Managing Change in an Oracle EBS Environment

Excerpt from the paper:

Introduction – The purpose of this paper is to give organizations ideas and options on how to manage changes in their Oracle E-business Suite (EBS) environment. The paper is not specific to any version or release of software nor is it applicable only to EBS environments. The principles and ideas herein can be used for from a simple to complex system to manage, document, track and audit changes in an environment. The change management system that you put in place for your organization will depend on any number of outside or inside agencies or requirements. This paper will touch on topics that should satisfy the majority of those requirements such as internal auditors, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC or HIPPAA. This paper can be used as a guide and you should consult with your audit and risk management teams on how and what you need to track in your organization.

What is a Change? – In setting up a change control system in your organization, you must first define the types of changes and which ones and how you would like to manage them. In an EBS environment, there are several types of changes to be managed, and each may have a different workflow for migration into production. The first is what I call master data. This would be objects like users, employees, customers, vendors, flexfield values and items. Secondly, are setup changes. This would be things like profile values and setup screen changes. The third type of change would be data fixes. This may be a fix from Oracle, or a fix developed by your own staff to fix a transactional issue. The final type of change is a very broad category defined as code changes. This can range from form personalization, custom reporting and descriptive flexfields to custom interfaces, workflows, database triggers and any other customizations you may have. This would also include Oracle provided patches and code changes. There may be changes that do not fit into any of these categories, and you should have a process for those as well.

If you would like to get a copy, please send en email to papers@infotegrity.com