IMPACTA: An Upgrade Assessment Tool for Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

Jun 01, 2020

ENERGY & UTILITIES | 6 min READ

COVID-19 has created a new normal for organizations across industries. Organizations need to focus their energies on transformational initiatives to build business resilience. In this article we focus on how Birlasoft’s IMPACTA an upgrade assessment tool for Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne can help organizations to transform the way they utilize JD Edwards for their business excellence.

Viral Doshi

Global Practice Director

JD Edwards Practice

Birlasoft

The Situation

The recent collapse in operating margins has made it very clear that operational excellence for oil and gas companies is no longer an option. As recently as February 2020, the conventional wisdom was that “$60 oil is the new $100 oil.” However, it is apparent that Basis of Estimate pricing ranges between $20 and $40 will be the industries’ reality for the foreseeable future. The mandate for the oil and gas industry now: Reduce cost structure and increase operational execution.

Yet while most oil and gas companies will struggle under current market conditions, innovators can position themselves for the future as well as increase their efficiency, agility, and productivity.

Energy companies know that each dollar spent running transactional processing systems would be better spent on transformational initiatives. An organization’s Oracle systems upgrades absorb OPEX by deflecting valuable internal resourcing away from critical core or high-impact initiatives. By leveraging a less expensive third-party provider who can remotely test and upgrade your Oracle environment, precious internal resources can be redirected onto higher value projects.

"Energy companies know that each dollar spent running transactional processing systems would be better spent on transformational initiatives. By leveraging a less expensive third-party provider who can remotely test and upgrade your Oracle environment, precious internal resources can be redirected onto higher value projects."

The Challenge

Oracle premium support for all the older versions of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, other than the E920 release, ended on March 2020.
Oracle will release quarterly updates for JDE E920 customers. These updates consist of newly added features in addition to bug fixes.
Being on JDE E920 also provides customers with the latest enhancements in terms of enhanced user experience, a platform for innovation to enhance productivity, and business process transformation to drive rapid business growth.
As a result, there is rush for JD Edwards customer to upgrade to the latest release, stay supported, and stay current on JDE E920.
Many customers have a heavily customized JDE environment, and are concerned about the effort, the timelines and cost to upgrade to the latest JDE EnterpriseOne release.
COVID-19 has created a new normal for customers that has resulted in some postponing their JDE upgrade plans. They need to run their business by surviving today while preparing for tomorrow and recover.

The Birlasoft Solution

IMPACTA is a Birlasoft tool that can be run remotely, provide customers with detailed reporting on the extent of their JDE customizations, as well as the delta information between new and existing functionality in order to:

Ready yourself
for the upgrade

Prioritize and
plan

IMPACTA can assess the customer’s environment and provide an insight into the scope and effort required to perform a technical retrofit of the objects which are customized. The tool helps customer in deciding their upgrade budget and provides a listing and analysis of all customized objects with 100% accuracy.

IMPACTA Upgrade Assessment tool

Key Features

IMPACTA is an automatic assessment tool which compares your Pristine ++ (Pristine with the same ESU level as Production) environment with your production environment and provides the listing of the customized objects, complexity of objects and efforts required to retrofit the objects based on the customization within the object.

IMAPCTA provides listing of all custom objects and divide the objects in 3 major categories:
Standard Modified: Custom code written directly into standard object

Clone Objects: Object copied from standard object and modifications are made to the cloned object

Custom objects: A custom objects build from scratch
IMPACTA provides clone objects and their parent object, copying which the clone object is created
IMPACTA provides comprehensive listing of objects by system code and by complexity looking at the custom lines of code written in the object
IMPACTA provides effort estimation by object complexity
IMPACTA provides last used history for all batch application which helps customers in deciding whether custom batch applications can be retired during upgrade if not used for a long time

Birlasoft Proprietary IMPACTA Tool

Key Benefits

IMPACTA is a tool which can be leveraged in pre-upgrade and during upgrade phase of the project. In pre-upgrade it provides list of objects and efforts require for retrofit the objects, to fix the budget for upgrade. During the upgrade IMPACTA tool helps project team in tracking and organizing objects during the retrofitting phase. Following are the key benefits of the tool

IMPACTA is a proven tool and has matured over a long period with more than 40 runs across various versions of JD Edwards and with customers ranging from Complex multi-instance environments to simple single instance environment.

A manual effort to analyze the custom environment for an upgrade could take anywhere between 6 to 8 weeks of efforts, IMPACTA can do this job in 2 weeks’ time.
IMPACTA provides the effort estimation with accuracy of 95% while manual effort estimation will go by individual judgement and may not be accurate in case of large no of customized objects.
IMPACTA is a proven tool and has matured over a long period with more than 40 runs across various versions of JD Edwards and with customers ranging from Complex multi-instance environments to simple single instance environment.

IMPACTA Variants and Types

IMPACTA comes along with a comprehensive Upgrade Assessment Pack offering (UAP) where detailed study is provided in other areas such as process areas, infrastructure, integrations along with the technical area. Please refer to our UAP Upgrade assessment offering for more details.
IMPACTA can also be run independently if customers choose to opt for a technical as is upgrade with no changes to business processes and no major updates to infrastructure and integrations.

IMPACTA Assessment Process

Impacta tool execution -compare 9.X PS with 9.X PD

System logs and tables are used to determine the status of the objects
Comparison done between PS and PD to determine differences in code, assuming ESU are uniformly applied across all the environments
Obsolete objects are excluded from scope
Objects checked out, but not changed are excluded from the scope

Initial object list (Standard, Clone, Custom)

The objects are divided into the different buckets (Standard, Clone, Custom, Third Party)
Objects from the Standard and Clone buckets are analysed further to understand the custom code, complexity and efforts required for retrofit
Objects from the Custom and Third Party buckets are documented to round off the effort and testing scope

Separate clones of standard from clones of custom

Objects that are copies of standard are separated from objects that are copies of custom
This is to determine the complexity of the custom code and the eligibility of a copy for any ESU patches, if any

IMPACTA standard object list v PS 9.2 (Simplified upgrade)

Oracle Manifest for Applications and Reports is compared with the Standard Modified Object List provided by IMPACTA
If an object has not been modified between legacy release and the future release, the object can be brought as is, reducing effort
Similar exercise is done for tables, business views and data structures

System analyzer reports -For DD and UDC complexity

Oracle has provided reports that compare DD item changes, UDC changes and version changes between environments
This list helps determine the complexity for CNC during spec merge

Final Object list with complexity

Sample screenshots - of product/offering, dashboards.

An overall IMPACTA Object filtering process to come out with final object list