Background

One of America’s top direct-selling companies employs a staff of 500 corporate employees and tens of thousands of independent consultants to sell an array of professional-grade kitchen items, such as cutlery, cookware, and bakeware.

Client Snapshot

• Industry: Consumer Products; Kitchen and Food Products
• Project Location: Chicago, IL
• No. of Employees: 500 corporate employees, 30,000+ independent sales consultants
• Annual Revenue: $300M USD

Since 2004, the company has used Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to run nearly every aspect of its business– from financials to procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, warehouse management, eCommerce, and sales. Their current version of Oracle EBS (11i) was outdated, unsupported by Oracle, and heavily-customized with numerous integrations to disparate systems used for sourcing and expenses, which obscured the company’s business processes. The lack of automated and self-service functionalities, and use of disparate systems forced employees to rely heavily on the IT staff for tasks such as submitting and approving expenses, procurement, order management, subledger accounting, and inventory.

In late-2017, they began searching for a partner to help them upgrade their Oracle EBS system to a newer and supported version (R12.2.6). In November 2017, they selected ennVee, an Oracle Gold Partner specializing in professional services, application management, business, and technology consulting services across the Oracle EBS ERP platform.

How the upgrade would help the company

First, the company needed to implement new functionalities in Release 12.2 that will improve business processes and boost employee productivity. Their existing environment is highly-customized, complex, and requires a substantial amount of manual effort to execute basic business activities.

Second, the upgrade to R12.2 would allow the company to save up to $1M USD annually by switching to a third party support provider, since their current version (11i) is not supported by Oracle.

Finally, the upgraded environment would provide greater stability for business users and delay the need to migrate to a Cloud platform by three years, at least.

Key Project Requirements:

1. Execute the technical upgrade from Oracle EBS 11i to R12.2.6
2. Retrofit Oracle EBS customizations
3. Make external system integrations compatible with R12.2.6
4. Remediate approximately 2,000 objects

Solution Approach

Solution Components

• Oracle E-Business Suite (11i, R12.2.6)
  • Oracle Financials
  • Oracle Supply Chain Management (Order Management, Inventory)
  • iProcurement
  • iExpense
• Vertex
• CardConnect Cloud
• ennVee ennABLE tool
• Order Import from Custom Order Portal
• Integration to Warehouse Management System

Key Integrations

• CardConnect for Credit Card Authorization
• Vertex Cloud for Tax
• Customer Master Data
• Bank, Branch, and Account Data for Customers
• Order Import from Custom Order Portal
• Integration to Warehouse Management System

Key Customizations & Process Improvements

Executing the 11i to R12.2.6 Upgrade

The upgrade kicked off in January of 2018 and underwent development and multiple testing cycles of CR1, CPR2, SIT, and UAT.

Phase I — Assessing the Impact of Custom Objects

We began by assessing the current Oracle EBS 11i environment to identify all custom objects and those that would be impacted by the upgrade. The assessment was done using ennVee's automated ennABLE tool and included a review of each impacted object by type (database, setup, RICEFW), complexity, and number of R12 changes required.

Phase II — Upgrading from 11i to R12.2.6

After assessing the 11i environment, ennVee upgraded the Oracle EBS system to R12.2.6.

• Each object was reviewed and retrofitted based on the R12.2.6 requirement.

  • Each table and column used was reviewed and changes were made as per the R12.2.6 data model

  • Each Oracle Standard API was reviewed for any new parameters that were added or removed and changes were made.

  • Each standard interface used was reviewed for any columns to be added or removed.

• All tables were upgraded to follow R12.2 standards by creating the synonym and Edition view in proper schemas.

• All objects types— Package/procedure/Functions —were moved to proper schemas as per R12.2 standards.

• All standard objects that had been customized were rebuilt by taking the new standard objects of R12.2.6. (This includes the forms/reports and workflow re-development).

• All custom forms/reports were re-compiled in the R12.2.6 instances.

• All payment formats were rebuilt as per R12 standards.

• All OAF pages were rebuilt as per R12 standards.

• All changes in SEPA payments were rebuilt as per R12.2.6 standards.

• All changes required for external systems were made – Card connect, Vertex, MDM, Hybris, etc.

• A migration script was built to automate the migration process.

• We identified the customizations that would no longer be needed due to the standard functionality that was available out of the box in R12.2.

• iProcurement and iExpenses was rolled out apart from the upgrade.

• Finally, ennVee made sure the client’s business process would run on R12.2.6 as they had in 11i.

• End-to-end flow test cases were provided to the client for testing.

• Detailed design documents were prepared for all of the above.

Outcome and Business Benefits

The project went live in October of 2018 and concluded with a two-week period of post-go-live support. ennVee successfully completed the upgrade on-budget in approximately 11 months, with time slightly extended to accommodate the client’s availability due to Accounting Period Close.

In addition to improving its business processes and performance with a more stable ERP system, the company realized the following benefits: