How to downscope your EBS upgrade project

Editor's Notes

• #4: [MARTY]Thanks Dori! Hi everyone, my name is Marty Rothenberg, and I am Panaya’s Principal Solution Architect. I am truly excited about today’s session. And I would like to personally thank everyone who was able to participate today. [ROY] Hi, I’m Roy Kidron, I would like to thank all of you as well.I am a Product Manager at Panaya, in charge of the Oracle domain. I’ve been in EBS for the past 17 years, as a developer, tech lead and project manager. I’ve managed two EBS upgrades, and I also worked at Oracle for 7 years.
• #5: [MARTY] So today we’re here to talk about Oracle EBS 12.2, and help you decide on how to upgrade, and what to expect in the process.   We’ll cover some key drivers around the 12.2 upgrade There are also important themes on Upgrade Challenges, so we’ll take a look at that And we’ll share some success factors and customer examples you can learn from   Our customers are having some nice acceleration results with Panaya solutions   So we'll close with a quick demo to see some tools to simplify and reduce the risk your upgrade.
• #6: [MARTY] Believe it or not, approximately 50% of Oracle EBS instances are still running on version 12.1 or earlier. But over the past year, we at Panaya have noticed more and more companies starting EBS 12.2 upgrade projects. There are a few drivers behind this accelerated movement to 12.2:   First and foremost, Oracle is pulling the plug on EBS 12.1 support. Without upgrading, you will be running a production environment that is unsupported.   Oracle is committed to adding functional innovations into EBS 12.2. You must move to 12.2 to access these innovations – which have been funded by your support license.   Another reason for the 12.2 move is online patching, which lets you adopt feature innovation more quickly into your organization, and with far less downtime.   Staying put on 12.1.3 is NOT an option for most companies.  You are not supported for production issues, and you will not get fixes - for lurking 12.1 issues identified by other customers.  Alternative support options via Oracle or third-party companies are prohibitively expensive. Polling question: What is your upgrade motivation?
• #7: [MARTY] Besides the underlying technical innovations introduced in EBS 12.2, Oracle is adding functional innovations as well. The September 2020 release, also called R12.2.10, included dozens of new features – including support for modern business models, a modernized UI, and increased operational efficiencies.     Oracle has doubled-down on Enterprise Command Centers, adding 8 new command centers, for a total of 30 command centers, and adding 30 new dashboards, now totalling over a hundred.   Order Management users will now be able leverage iStore to zero-in on best products and pricing.   And Procurement users will be see improved product comparison tools. And a new auto suggest feature will steer employees to catalog items that match non-catalog items.   Oracle’s commitment to adding innovation into on-premise 12.2 is a refreshing change from messages received just a few years ago, stating that future ERP innovations would focus exclusively on their Cloud offering.
• #8: [MARTY] The paradigm shift of online patching cannot be overstated.   In 12.2, Patches can be applied while your production system is fully operational. So the savings on business downtime is huge.    This makes it so much easier for companies to introduce upgrades within 12.2. You can easily introduce new out-of-the-box features, install security patches, and more.   This is especially helpful because in 12.2, patches are much larger to work with. Oracle’s updates are now cumulative, and combine bug fixes and new features into a consolidated, suite-wide patch set.   Moreover, once you are on 12.2, you can obtain a new fusion middleware platform technology stack, without having to upgrade the application code.
• #9: [ROY] Hi, it’s Roy again.Now that Marty’s covered the key drivers, Let's start looking at some challenges. We are seeing customer challenges primarily around architectural changes, hardware and database version upgrades, component customizations, and the effectiveness of Oracle readiness scripts.   Firstly, EBS 12.2 requires a database version change and that might require companies to make hardware changes as well. By themselves, these architecture upgrades can be expensive and time consuming. An alternative approach is to leverage this upgrade milestone and simultaneously move EBS operations to private cloud infrastructures. Third party vendors can even accelerate the Oracle database upgrade. The rationalization of on-premise hardware and related resources can help mitigate the overall cost of the upgrade effort.
• #10: [ROY] Moving to a new patching-compliant architecture means that there are dozens of new coding rules to abide by. When changing your architecture, be aware that every single line of custom code that interacts with the database is going to be affected. This is a lot of risk to understand and to manage. Again,  every single line of custom code that interacts with the database is going to be affected.    Image source : https://www.claremont.co.uk/oracle-e-business-suite-12-2-and-online-patching/ 
• #11: [ROY] As part of this EBS upgrade, standard objects will be changed, made obsolete, or deleted outright. Even more significantly, you will need to adapt all of your custom code to the new 12.2 OLP compliance standards. This, in turn, will affect your customizations and critical business processes.   Based on Panaya’s crowd wisdom - insights from over 500 successful Oracle EBS upgrade projects - the average duration of an R12.2 upgrade project correlates directly to the amount of EBS customizations used in production. This chart illustrates the relationship. As you can see, the more customized your EBS implementation is – the longer it will take you to upgrade.  
• #12: [ROY] Most customers approach these challenges by starting with Oracle’s Readiness Report and Compliance Checker to assess their customizations and to identify the objects that do not comply with the R12.2 development standards Unfortunately, Oracle’s scripts do not provide optimal results. The output format is not user friendly, and results do not include explanations or remediation instructions. Moreover, 80% of Oracle Readiness Report script results are either false alarms or not even actionable.  We see this as a huge gap for customers. These Oracle reports do not accurately address the risk and work plan that customers need to quantify.   Next up, I’m gonna talk about one of my EBS upgrades, but first, a second polling questions. Don’t worry, it’s the last one. Polling question: Will you upgrade to 12.2.9 or 12.2.10?
• #13: [ROY] As an Oracle Consulting project manager, I was in the Israeli Air Force for seven years, and I’ve managed their EBS upgrade from version 11.5.10.2 to R12.1.3. The project spanned two years, and it cost almost 1 and a half million dollars. There were seven of us, and we decided to do seven different trials, which best suited this specific implementation. The best practice is to do 5 to 6 trials, but I know of companies who did 19 of them, and kept discovering new bugs EVERY time. By the way, I think that with Panaya, you can make do with 4 trials, and that’s including a dry run and the go live itself. Anyway, I did all of the impact analysis manually, reading Oracle’s documentation and running queries in the database, trying to find all the objects that should be changed. In the end, even after all the hard work, fixing tens of thousands of lines of code, a lot of bugs were found AFTER we went live, because my team didn’t find them in our testing, and the customers didn’t find them in the UAT. And we had a very experienced team, and excellent users. Our goal today is to help you avoid some of those challenges.  Next up, Marty will share some best practices the Panaya team has seen working with our customers over the last few years on Oracle upgrades.
• #14: [MARTY] These Best Practices may not be earth-shattering to you, but they do play critical roles within your upgrade initiative Your strategy must include defining the scope of work, resources, timeline and efforts. Remember to scope out unused customizations that will slow you down and remove unneeded historical data from the production environment before you even start. Be sure to allocate enough time and resources for an iterative upgrade approach. Capture baseline execution timing, starting with the first upgrade simulation and refine your estimates accordingly.   Define a formal approach for implementing and testing patches required - outside of the upgrade process - to resolve application issues that may arise during the testing phase.
• #15: [MARTY] Remove all non-relevant objects and unused solutions from your scope. This applies to seeded and custom object remediation between Oracle Apps versions.  Make sure to identify all custom objects and assign priority and ownership to the project team  Plan early for new RICE/CEMLI functionality replacement or enhancement associated to gaps between Oracle releases. 
• #16: [MARTY] Protect your integration touchpoints. You need to get a handle on your integration use cases. What custom interfaces do you have in place? Do you have third-party applications installed? What satellite systems are integrated with EBS? Then, you will need to figure out if there are compatibility issues for R12.2, and make sure your development teams know what to do
• #17: [MARTY] My last tip is about testing. Be sure to define what should be tested and by whom. Understand that testing for an upgrade is much more than typical projects you might be accustomed to.  You will potentially need to engage more business teams than usual to validate regression quality for the entire business.  When upgrading, you need to test ALL of your business operations, and your test suite may not be ready for that.  We are also seeing a special risk relating to interfaces and background processes. Many teams do not have a test library in place to test all of their interfaces. Be sure to take a close look at this when planning your upgrade.
• #18: [MARTY] Panaya’s SaaS-based, change intelligence platform meets these challenges – including the impact on customizations and integration touch points. Our upgrade simulation starts with an automated project assessment that determines your upgrade project scope and size.  This includes code remediation work recommended by Oracle ADZ scripts, plus a range of additional impact analytics that predict your upgrade failure points and compatibility issues. Panaya also sizes up your testing effort, and pinpoints high-risk areas for your business. Panaya can provide you with a complementary automated assessment in less than 48 hours!
• #19: [MARTY] Panaya Change Intelligence also builds a clear-cut upgrade project plan within 48 hours, based on your landscape configuration, to help you efficiently plan the upgrade to your desired Oracle EBS release. Panaya’s AI-based, runtime simulation also provides technical resource estimates that you can use for your project budgeting.   Panaya’s machine learning identifies change impact based on your customization and usage mapping. We deliver a scoped and prioritized corrections list and a test plan that minimizes risk. Panaya identifies more impacted components than any other solution on the market, including 30% better coverage as compared to Oracle’s Readiness scripts.   Panaya’s algorithms include the insights provided by the Oracle Readiness Report and prioritizes only the actionable ones. It also removes many false alarms identified in this report, so your project is fully optimized.   This enables you to identify risk, and plan your project at any time, without any OLP expertise.   Panaya further optimizes your test plan based on impact and usage. And Panaya’s powerful, built-in test and defect management system helps you accelerate functional testing, while ensuring uncompromising quality.
• #20: [MARTY] Panaya is a powerful, non-invasive change intelligence platform. We provide customers with an extraction program that aggregates component metadata and usage statistics from an EBS landscape. The results are then stored in Excel files that can be reviewed by the customer before uploading into Panaya. Panaya then runs patented runtime simulation algorithms against your metadata, relative to your desired target environment. So, for example, the impact analysis of an moving a customer from EBS 12.1.3 to 12.2.8 may be different than one moving from 12.1 to 12.2.10. Within 48 hours, Panaya generates a complete SaaS-based project framework including Correction Tasks and Unit Test Tasks. These tasks are correlated so if a correction is downscoped due to low priority, its related test task is deactivated as well. Similarly, a pending unit test cannot be run until all related corrections are completed. Panaya’s Enterprise Test & Defect management platform is powerful yet very easy to use. We provide real-time custom code and patch analysis capabilities so IT can anticipate all impact and risk before changing code or deploying new patches. These features are very differentiating but are, pardon the pun, out of scope of today’s session. ###END of notes### Change Impact Simulation Oracle R12 upgrades, point-release upgrades Oracle patches Code Dependency & Data Dependency analysis Risk-based Testing for custom code changes Collaborative Test Acceleration & Mgmt. Automated test script creation Automated documentation & test evidence Accelerated manual testing ALM integration (UFT, Worksoft) Code Remediation Code-line level instructions, prioritized based on business usage
• #21: [MARTY] As mentioned earlier, all of our customer will invariably run Oracle’s scripts and utilities to identify OLP incompatible components. Oracle’s tools are free and do provide a lot of valuable insights. So why use Panaya? The answer is quite simple.
• #22: [MARTY] As you can see, Panaya’s analytics are deeper and broader than Oracle’s. As mentioned earlier, Panaya identifies more impacted components than any other solution on the market, including 30% better coverage as compared to Oracle’s Readiness scripts. Panaya provides exclusive coverage to impact on components such as: Server-based customizations such as forms, reports, scripts, frameworks Alerts, triggers, personalizations, and Discoverer reports, as well as Some SQL package issues not flagged by Oracle Panaya, therefore, identifies go-live risk in areas that Oracle does not. And we even exclude the many false alarms found in Oracle’s output. Panaya results become the foundation of a SaaS-based project framework that allows customers to quickly kick off their upgrade remediation, track progress in real time and complete their initiatives faster, with less resources, and with less go-live risk.
• #23: [MARTY] Roy, maybe you can share some examples of Panaya’s Oracle EBS success stories.  I think that will help everyone understand the take-home benefits our customers are seeing.   [ROY] Thanks, Marty.  Panaya has many Oracle EBS success stories. Take Trombini for example, the largest recycler of paper for packaging in Brazil. With over 2,000 employees, their goal was to have minimal business downtime and maximum quality release. Their upgrade with Panaya was a success with zero defects at Go-live and zero disruption to production. Petmate, for example, was able to complete their upgrade project within 5 months and had zero defects. They even scoped out 30% of the identified correction activities based on priority and usage.  At Cummins, Panaya accelerated their upgrade project by 50% by streamlining testing across the business. For more details and for even more success stories, please visit our web site at www.panaya.com
• #24: [ROY] Now I will stop sharing my screen and hand it over to Marty, who will do our demo. ######### IGNORE ########## Now its time for your questions! So I will hand it back to Josh. We use Microfocus ALM. Is it Panaya different from ALM? Panaya is very different from Microfocus ALM. Onboarding and training users takes less than a day as the Panaya platform is much easier to use. Panaya’s cloud solution is accessible from anywhere. Panaya is more than a test management tool, it also supports the capturing of complete business processes with a click of a mouse. Can we reuse test steps in multiple tests? Absolutely! With Panaya Test Dynamix, your existing test assets can be reused by importing them into the platform. Within 48 hours, they will be ready for you to use within Panaya. Test assets in Panaya can be referenced in other cycles and easily repurposed for multiple test runs. Do you support agile testing? We do support both waterfall and agile methodologies, We do not enforce Agile testing but We bring speed and agility into the testing process. How long does it take to implement this system? System setup is completed in a few minutes. The onboarding of Panaya users can take from 1 hour to a few hours depending on what is the user expected to do. For running tests, 1 hour is in many time sufficient.  Is there an option to view requirement trace-ability YES! This is a an easy to use, yet powerful feature of the Panaya platform. You can always trace back from a defect to the original requirement if it’s a business or IT requirement. Do you have any specific thoughts on how to motivate testers throughout remote UAT within this COVID-19 world? We have found that motivation is directly proportional to testing tool's ease of use. Panaya has seen companies' UAT cycles fail to uncover mission-critical issues because their testers do not test properly with the non-user friendly tools provided. Panaya Test Dynamix is easy to use and does all the hard work for testers behind the scenes (for example- auto-generated test evidence). Testers love using it and usually run their tests correctly with Panaya. Are there specific templates for importing tests in Panaya? Yes. Panaya provides authorized users with two different excel templates that support real-time imports of test assets into our platform. But we also offer our testbox which allows to drop your files in word, PDF or excel and within 48 hours they will be converted into panaya and ready for execution.  What happens when a user is sitting on a task? is there an escalation process? Bottlenecks can be seen through real-time reports and dashboards. There are collaborative capabilities within Panaya Test Dynamix that improve testing notifications and efficiencies. Is the configuration of remote users complex? Not at all, we know that other tools may require comprehensive configuration but with panaya, being a SaaS solution, there is very little to configure. Your users will be executing tests in no time. Do you have a free trial?Yes we do! We will share the details on how to register for a free trial following this session via email. We are in a regulated industry and some of our compliance processes are very strict. How do you support us?Sure, our Compliance features include regulated cycles so that no user can execute before complete reviewing processes has taken place, approval of tests, e-signature of runs and evidence, audit-ready documentation, defect resolution workflow and much more. We have many regulated customers who need to comply with different regulations.  Can we reuse the same processes cross countries and adapt it? Everything in Panaya has been developed with the thought of reusing in place. You can duplicate, copy from one project to another. import from other projects into new cycles, copy the data and then change it and much more.  We use Microfocus ALM, can we use our existing scripts in Panaya? Absolutely! You can use our Testbox to upload your test cases in Word, Excel or PDF and Panaya will create the tests for you within 48 hours. This service is free of charge, included in any subscription.
• #25: [ROY] Thank you, Marty, for that demo. Before we go to Q&A, I just want to remind everyone of our automated EBS upgrade assessment report, And tell you that we are offering a complementary assessment to ALL OATUG Forum participants. You’ll get a detailed, tailor-made analysis of your own EBS upgrade, for free. You can contact us for your free assessment. Our emails are on the next slide.
• #26: [ROY] Now it’s time for your questions! So I will hand it back to Hannah.