by Lee Balsom
Knowing for certain how long your JDE E1 upgrade will take can save you thousands
For many years, companies considered the retrofitting activity of an JDE E1 upgrade project to be the ‘poor relation’. Reasons for this vary, but often it’s because the retrofitting can be seen as difficult to quantify, at least with any accuracy. This problem guarantees that resourcing and budgeting for the retrofit can be tricky to pin down, and of course an ‘unknown’ situation risks a project where the end-in-sight is just an ambitious concept.
Organizations are also faced with the “functional assessment” challenge, where the enhancements/customizations are analyzed to determine relevancy under the “to-release”. Faced with often many thousands of objects in the retrofit list, this effort is usually performed after the retrofitting, if only out of convenience.
This approach means retrofitting many hundreds of objects unnecessarily, costing valuable time and money. The result is objects that are simply unused or void in the current system. Yet it’s often seen as “simpler” to just push the object to the “to release” as fast as possible.
What’s the solution for your next JDE E1 upgrade?
Dimension Analyze™ is DWS’ answer to this complex and expensive problem. By examining the detail of every object in your modified footprint during the upgrade planning process, DWS is able to determine many different scenarios that deem a given object as “retire-able”. If an object isn’t used or needed, why perform the retrofit effort? And if retired up-front then of course there is no requirement to perform functional assessment of it.
In addition, Dimension Analyze is able to take the remaining “in-play” objects and determine precisely how long each will take to upgrade. This is performed to such an accurate level that DWS will happily fix-price and fix-timescale the retrofit process for our clients.
Explore how DWS’ Dimension Analyze™ led to a 39% reduction in modified footprint and saved 236 man days of retrofitting and associated testing for Wilbur-Ellis.
By knowing the retrofit duration of each object, it’s a relatively simple process to determine the “critical path” objects. The objects that will inevitably make up a small percentage (by count) but that represent a large portion of the total effort. These objects can then be the focus for the functional assessors, spending their valuable time on the most heavily modified, complex objects, and not wasting their time on the much larger number of small-impact objects.
Knowing the exact duration of what is otherwise a vague (at best) effort reduces risk of scope-creep and allows the retrofit to be resourced by the optimum number of developers to ensure the project meets its deadlines, within a fixed budget.
This blog post has so far has probably been most relevant to clients upgrading to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2 from an earlier release of E1. The obvious next question is “what about customers already at JDE E1 9.2 looking to get code-current?”.
The good news is that a solution exists to give the same benefits as Dimension Analyze, to customers that have already upgraded to JDE E1 9.2 release. Dimension Tempo™ performs a similar process, removing objects that are no longer relevant ensuring your customized footprint always remains lean and more-easily maintainable, as well as ensuring the code-current retrofit is delivered for a pre-determined cost.
Whether you are performing an upgrade to move to release JDE E1 9.2 or are running a code-current change event project once on JDE E1 9.2, DWS has the products and services to ensure your retrofitting is accurate, simple and seamless. Contact us now to discuss your requirements.
