Shelby Klingerman, Content Curator |

Manish Somani, Product Manager at Oracle, spoke at INFOCUS 18 about the steps you need to take to stay current with JD Edwards. According to Manish, there are six “rocks” that users should follow when going through an upgrade. These rocks include planning, customizations, integrations, data, testing and training.

Make sure your upgrade plan includes these 6 steps:

Planning

During the planning phase, it is important to document your business processes, select your upgrade type, establish a team, create a project name and logo to boost morale, come up with a plan for testing and training, and more. All of these steps will help make your upgrade go more smoothly.

Customizations

Customizations are expensive and difficult to manage during upgrades. They can often make upgrades more complicated than they should be. Ideally, customers should strive to “get vanilla,” meaning avoid customizations as much as you can.

Integrations

When looking at integrations, it’s important to ask yourself, “Do I still need this integration?” There might be a new feature in your upgrade that can do the same job, so you may be able to reduce the number of integrations into your system. It’s helpful to consult third-party vendors before starting your integration efforts.

Data

Data reductions can save you a lot of time during an upgrade. If you can either archive or purge large portions of your data, you should strongly consider doing so. It is also crucial to repeat data migration several times until you are able to do it without any hiccups. Data migration is your most significant time risk on your go-live, so it’s important to get it right. Practice makes perfect!

Testing

Testing is crucial to making sure your go-live goes smoothly. Complete unit testing, integration testing, performance and scalability testing, user acceptance testing and more to make sure things go as planned.

Training

Training your users is imperative. You should go over the methodology with them all before your go-live date to make sure that they know how things work. If your users don’t understand the system, it’s a failed project!

Manish ended his session by talking about the benefits of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Continuous Delivery and Adoption. Taking on new releases in smaller, more frequent doses on a regular basis will reduce the need for costly, huge updates. This approach is also much easier to manage and has a lower risk of business disruption.

Stay up to date on the latest JD Edwards product news, updates, features, education and networking opportunities by signing up for the Quest JD Edwards Weekly Download!