8 MIN READ

ennVee helps a leading manufacturer eliminate enterprise risk and simplify consecutive Oracle EBS 11i to R12.2 upgrades.

  1. Background
  2. Challenges
  3. Approach
  4. Technical Information
  5. Outcome

Backgroundblog-hero-r122-upgrade-mfg-industry

A leading designer and manufacturer of complex metal components for the Aerospace industry rely on the Oracle E-Business suite platform to support its business operations. The manufacturer has multiple Oracle EBS instances running on the unsupported version 11.5.10.2. As part of its long-term consolidation plan, it must upgrade all instances to the same supported R12.2.5 version of Oracle EBS.

After bringing the corporate system up to 12.2.5 the company will be able to standardize on the enterprise level so the integration is smoother. The EBS upgrade would enable the company to replace various customizations and leverage the new functionalities available in R12.2, and improve the User Interface for application users.


Challenges

  1. A significant amount of customization in 11i. There were numerous changes in the EBS 11i Finance and Sub-ledger Accounting modules and many older forms that needed to be moved into OAF.
  2. Technology challenges stemming from architectural changes
  3. Business testing

The objectives of the upgrade were to:

  • Eliminate enterprise-level risk to the business due to the unsupported 11i version
  • Make the integration and standardization process smoother for the future 11i to R12.2.5 upgrades.
  • Support the long-term consolidation plan and efforts

11i to R12.2.5 Upgrade Approach

  1. Plan and scope the upgrade
  2. Perform upgrade patching and associated DBA activities
  3. Functional validation and delta setups
  4. Use ennABLE for custom object remediation and migration
  5. Manually remediate any objects that aren't automatically remediated by ennABLE
  6. Bug fix remediated objects impacted by the upgrade
  7. Validate and test RICE-W components
  8. Conduct CRP and support UAT
  9. Manage the entire code migration process with the client technical team
  10. Migrate to Production
  11. Go-live

Pre-upgrade impact assessment

Because the company's instance was heavily customized they wanted to understand how their level of customization would impact the upgrade. We used our ennABLE tool to automatically extract the custom object details from 11i and analyze the code to identify the changes in R12.2.5.

Once we knew the changes involved in each of the identified custom objects, we used the tool to group each object by type: Database, Setup, or RICEFW. There were a total of 3,122 custom objects (a breakdown is provided below):

Total custom objects

Database objects (Custom tables, sequences, synonyms, triggers, functions, indexes, views, materialized views, packages, package body, procedures)

1251

Setup objects (Concurrent programs, custom profiles, form function, look-ups, menu, request groups, request set, responsibilities, users, value sets)

295

RICEFW objects (Reports, forms, SQL scripts, shell scripts, alerts, control files, forms personalizations, OAF personalizations, workflows, custom.pll)

1576

Total custom objects

3122

Remediating and migrating custom objects

Next, we used the ennABLE tool to automatically remediate the impacted custom objects to suit the target R12.2.5 environment. Any objects that were out of scope from automated remediation were fixed manually (i.e. Workflows, OAF Forms, and Java Classes).

All remediated code was placed in the directory path provided by the company's IT team. (This path should be defined as a DB directory or UTL file path as the database should access it).

The DBA team migrated the remediated objects to the R12.2.5 instance with a specific mode (Test / Bin) respective to the object type.

CRP

We facilitated the first Conference Room Pilot (CRP) to demonstrate the new functionality. We also included the remediated objects from the DEV instance onwards to test and validate the end-to-end functionality in the CRP instance (wherein the customizations were built on Oracle Standard reports and were replaced with newer versions).

This phase also involved analyzing the customizations and new standard reports that came with newer, additional features. We embedded the customizations on the revised R12 versions to suit the client's requirements.

Go-live

The DBAs performed a mock go-live as a part of the rehearsal activity for the final go-live/cutover.

Technical Information

The following tools and technologies were involved in the upgrade project:

  • Oracle E-Business Suite (11.5.10.2, R12.2.5)
  • ennABLE automated remediation tool
  • Oracle Forms 10g
  • Oracle Reports 10g
  • Putty & WinSCP
  • SQL Developer/TOAD
  • Workflow builder
  • JDeveloper

Outcome

We successfully upgraded the first EBS 11i instance which will pave the way for the company's remaining 11i upgrades. Given that the custom objects were remediated automatically, we significantly reduced the overall time-to-upgrade and amount of re-work during other testing phases. Additional benefits include:

60% reduction in customization development time through automation. 

Eliminated business risk with a validated Disaster Recovery plan that is available as expected around multiple business units.

A standardized enterprise application that supports the corporate vision and standardized technologies due to platform change.

Reduced the cost of steady-state support by upgrading to the latest EBS version and better positioned to meet vendor support requirements.

Substantial User Interface (UI) and business improvements by replacing legacy customizations with new functionalities in EBS 12.2.5.


Related

ennVee helps a consumer products company upgrade from Oracle EBS 11i to R12.2.6

4-6-week R12.2 upgrade customization impact assessment