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Planning Your Oracle
E-Business Suite Upgrade from
Release 11i to Release 12.1
An Oracle White Paper
January 2011
Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from
                          Release 11i to Release 12.1




Introduction ....................................................................................................... 4 
Business Value of Upgrading to Release 12.1 ............................................... 5 
     Release 12 Value Proposition ................................................................. 5 
     Release 12.1 Value Proposition.............................................................. 6 
Upgrade Planning Tips ..................................................................................... 8 
     Tip #1 – Target Release 12.1 for Your Upgrade................................. 8 
     Tip #2 – Allocate Enough Time and Resources to Your Project .... 8 
     Tip #3 – Determine Your Upgrade Approach.................................... 9 
     Tip #4 – Determine Your Project’s Technical Scope ...................... 10 
     Tip #5 – Determine Your Project’s Functional Scope .................... 10 
     Tip #6 – Plan for Required Financials Setup Steps .......................... 11 
     Tip #7 – Avoid Upgrading Obsolete Functionality.......................... 11 
     Tip #8 – Determine Your Data Migration Strategy ......................... 12 
     Tip #9 – Assemble a Project Team that Combines Technical and
     Functional Skill Sets............................................................................... 12 
     Tip #10 – Involve Your Business Users at Every Project Phase ... 13 
     Tip #11 – Keep Your Project Team in Place through Your First
     Financials Close ...................................................................................... 14 
     Tip #12 – Develop a Robust Testing Strategy .................................. 14 
     Tip #13 – Plan to Test with Upgraded As Well as New Data and at
     Full Volumes........................................................................................... 16 
     Tip #14 – Plan to Do Load and Volume Testing............................. 16 
     Tip #15 – Engage with Oracle Support ............................................. 17 
     Tip #16 – Develop an Issue Resolution Strategy.............................. 19 
     Tip #17 – Take Advantage of Oracle E-Business Suite
     Diagnostics .............................................................................................. 19
     Tip #18 – Inventory Your Customizations and Prioritize Them for
     Upgrade ................................................................................................... 20 
     Tip #19 – Consider Migrating Your Reports to Business
     Intelligence Publisher............................................................................. 23 
     Tip #20 – Review Your Integrations and Consider Modernizing
     Them ........................................................................................................ 24 
     Tip #21 – Reexamine User Roles and Responsibilities and Business
     Processes.................................................................................................. 25 




                  Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1         Page 2
Tip #22 – Consider Using Oracle’s Process Documentation and
  End User Training Tools ...................................................................... 26 
  Tip #23 – Acquire Release 12.1 Knowledge...................................... 27 
  Tip #24 – Fully Utilize Available Upgrade Information.................. 29 
  Tip #25 – Consider Using the Maintenance Wizard ........................ 30 
  Tip #26 – Take Steps to Minimize Downtime.................................. 31 
  Tip #27 – Identify Required and Recommended Pre- and Post-
  Upgrade Patches..................................................................................... 34 
  Tip #28 – Review your System for Compliance with Security Best
  Practices ................................................................................................... 35 
  Tip #29 – After Your Go-Live, Stay Current with Latest Code..... 35 
  Tip #30 – After Your Go-Live, Stay Current with Latest
  Information ............................................................................................. 35 
My Oracle Support Knowledge Document References ....................... 37 
Change Record ............................................................................................ 38 




              Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1         Page 3
Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from
                          Release 11i to Release 12.1




INTRODUCTION


This white paper offers best practice advice to customers currently on Release 11i
who are planning a Release 12.1 upgrade. IT professionals involved with planning,
managing, or running a Release 12.1 upgrade project are the primary audience.
This paper combines advice from professionals in Oracle’s Support, Consulting, IT,
and Development organizations with real-life lessons learned from customers who
are already live on Release 12.1. In a nutshell, this paper tells you “things you
wished you knew” before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project.
Following a brief overview of the Release 12.1 upgrade value proposition, this
paper launches into specific upgrade planning tips to help you:
   •   Understand the factors that can affect your project’s duration
   •   Decide your project scope, and avoid missteps that can needlessly increase
   your scope
   •   Assemble the right project team
   •   Develop a robust testing strategy
   •   Upgrade your custom code
   •   Minimize your upgrade downtime
   •   Leverage all of the Oracle Support resources that are available to you
   •   Identify the Oracle tools that can improve your upgrade and maintenance
   experience
   •   Become familiar with the full range of Oracle’s information resources
This white paper is intended to be a living document. As we gather additional
Release 12.1 upgrade planning advice, we will revise and re-publish it as My Oracle
Support Knowledge Document 987516.1.




             Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 4
BUSINESS VALUE OF UPGRADING TO RELEASE 12.1
                                             Release 12, which became available in January 2007, included major architectural
                                             improvements to the Financials products to support global and shared service
                                             operations, improve operational efficiencies, and reduce risk. It also incorporated
                                             the latest revisions to Oracle’s middleware and database technologies.
                                             Release 12.1, which became available in May 2009, rounds out Release 12 with
                                             significant enhancements to the other product areas, including Procurement,
                                             Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, Customer Relationship
                                             Management and Master Data Management. It also contains usability
                                             improvements and centralized life cycle management.

                                             Release 12 Value Proposition

Release 12 introduced a new centralized      Release 12 introduced a new centralized architecture that improves support for
  architecture that improves support for     shared services while standardizing and simplifying the financial infrastructure
shared services while standardizing and
                                             across your enterprise. It supports the centralization of the following key business
  simplifying the financial infrastructure
                                             functions:
                 across your enterprise.
                                                •   Accounting policies are standardized across the entire enterprise with
                                                Subledger Accounting, ensuring adherence to the same set of accounting rules.
                                                •    Financial results are stored and easily accessible with Ledgers and Ledger
                                                Sets to support faster and simpler period end closing.
                                                •  Legal entities easily model legal corporate structures and tie all related
                                                components together with Legal Entity Configurator.
                                                •   Banks and bank accounts are centrally managed, providing a single point of
                                                access for internal bank accounts across Oracle applications.
                                                •   Payments are centrally disbursed and captured with Oracle Payments,
                                                automating and streamlining integration with external financial institutions.
                                                •   Transaction taxes are consistently managed and processed with E-Business
                                                Tax, which offers consistent support and control of complex transactional tax
                                                requirements across the enterprise.
                                                •  Inter- and Intra-company accounts are centrally defined with the Advanced
                                                Global Intercompany System to improve period end reconciliation.
                                             Release 12 also introduced improvements in end user productivity, including
                                             dashboards, step-by-step checklists, wizard-like pages, and consolidated single-page
                                             setups in these and other product areas:
                                                •   Collections
                                                •   Payments
                                                •   Accounting Setup
                                                •   Tax




                                                          Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 5
Release 12 made producing all types of reports much easier – whether reports that
                                           include images, charts, multiple fonts and colors, board quality financial statements
                                           or government mandated forms. By delivering reports using Business Intelligence
                                           Publisher – which uses an extract and template model – we put the capability to
                                           format and deliver reports in the hands of business users, and enabled our
                                           customers’ compliance with local reporting obligations.
                                           In addition, Release 12 included enhancements across the Financials products to
                                           support global business growth at lower cost with more control and flexibility.
                                           Below is a sample of the more than 300 new features and enhancements introduced
                                           in Release 12:
                                              •   Replacement for disabled accounts
                                              •   Invoice line level entry and approval
                                              •   Partial period revenue recognition
                                              •   COGS and revenue matching
                                              •   Line level cash applications
                                              •   Conversion of delinquent receivables to payment plans
                                              •   Funds optimization with cash pooling and zero balancing
                                              •   Bank account-level reconciliation options and tolerances
                                              •   Rollback on select assets with Automatic Depreciation Rollback
                                              •   Streamlined receipts management with receipts tracking and receipts
                                              missing capabilities

                                           Release 12.1 Value Proposition

Release 12.1 rounds out Release 12 with    Release 12.1 rounds out Release 12 with significant enhancements to all of the
  significant enhancements to all of the   other product areas. Some key new features in Release 12.1 and in related analytics
                   other product areas.
                                           and integration solutions are:
                                              •    Sourcing enhancements to streamline sourcing processes, enforce
                                              compliance and reduce risk, and achieve sustained savings; these include Excel
                                              integration to run what-if analysis, Earnest Money Deposits, two-stage
                                              evaluation of Request for Proposal (RFP), and Cost Factors and Price Factors;
                                              new capabilities such as spend classification and analysis have also been added
                                              •   High volume warehouse operations support, including advanced wave
                                              planning, demand-based forward pick replenishment, and integration with
                                              Oracle Transportation Management
                                              •   Optimization of supply, demand and design chains with the new Value
                                              Chain Planning solutions in Oracle Supply Chain Management
                                              •   Talent Management improvements, including summarization of all talent
                                              information in a single user-friendly Talent Profile page, recruitment dashboards,




                                                        Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 6
interview management, learner groups and mandatory enrollment in Learning
  Management, objectives management and line of sight/cascading of objectives
  in performance management; also, a new succession planning module, as well as
  continued support for Global HR and Payrolls
  •   Ability to view fully-loaded estimated costs (including transportation, duties,
  and taxes) across the complete supply chain with Oracle Landed Cost
  Management
  •    Ability to manage vendor rebates and special price requests and have
  complete visibility into the ROI for promotional funds and the effect of supplier
  price changes with Oracle Supplier Ship & Debit and Price Protection for
  Wholesale Distribution
  •   Ability to manage cash flow and payment holds and to ensure that
  subcontractors satisfy contract deliverables with Subcontractor Payments for
  Engineering & Construction, Utilities, Oil & Gas, Telecommunications and
  anyone else
We continue to add new functionality to Release 12.1 on a regular basis. For
example, we provided release update packs (RUPs) in December 2009 (12.1.2) and
again in August 2010 (12.1.3). These RUPs contain statutory and regulatory
updates as well as enhancements across the E-Business Suite product areas. Key
highlights include enhancements in Service and Field Service and in Supplier
Lifecycle Management, and improvements in usability and user experience. More
specifically, we delivered:
  •   Service and Field Service Dispatch Enhancements for improved Dispatch
  Center Workbench Task Management, Mobile Field Service technician screen
  personalization and auto sync; Additional Cost factor Support for more effective
  Scheduling of Technicians; Partnership with Trimble for GPS Support; and
  optimized and streamlined Service Request Creation & Management for faster
  data entry
  •   Supplier Lifecycle Management and Supplier Data Hub to support extended
  supplier registration, profiling and performance management, along with Master
  Data Management capabilities such as de-duping and merging
  •   Usability enhancements across the E-Business Suite, including Web 2.0
  controls such as mouse-over and pop-ups, in-line editing of attachments, and
  look-ahead searching, as well as support for embedding rich content such as
  business intelligence reports, dashboards, and so on.
Extending the overall 12.1 release, we introduced two new products – Supplier
Lifecycle Management and Supplier Data Hub. We also released new and
enhanced Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) integrations; and two
new analytical applications – Incentive Compensation Analytics and Spend
Classification.




            Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 7
UPGRADE PLANNING TIPS

                                             Tip #1 – Target Release 12.1 for Your Upgrade

 Any customer beginning an 11i upgrade       Any customer beginning an 11i upgrade project or planning a new installation of
 project or planning a new installation of   Oracle E-Business Suite should target Release 12.1. While customers can expect
  Oracle E-Business Suite should target
                                             the same support service level for Release 12 as for Release 12.1, Release 12.1 has a
                            Release 12.1.
                                             longer support horizon and will be the basis for all future enhancements.
                                             If you are already in progress with an upgrade to Release 12 – unless you are in the
                                             late stages of stabilizing on the release, we recommend that you consider changing
                                             your target to Release 12.1. Several customers already underway with an 11i to
                                             Release 12 upgrade were able to cut over to Release 12.1 without a material impact
                                             on their budget or schedule. One enterprise changed direction from 12 to 12.1 just
                                             two months prior to their planned go-live and still made their original go-live date.
                                             If you are already live on Release 12, we encourage you to consider an upgrade to
                                             Release 12.1. While the Release 12 to 12.1 Financials upgrade has very minor
                                             impacts, the functional advances in other product areas are compelling and mostly
                                             incremental, posing a minimal disruption to your Release 12 deployment.

                                             Tip #2 – Allocate Enough Time and Resources to Your Project

Plan for your 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade    Plan for your 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade to require more time and resources than
to require more time and resources than      were required for E-Business Suite maintenance pack upgrades, such as the upgrade
      were required for E-Business Suite
                                             from 11.5.9 to 11.5.10. An 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade involves significant changes
maintenance pack upgrades, such as the
                                             in data model and functionality, especially in the Financials product area. Release
          upgrade from 11.5.9 to 11.5.10.
                                             12.1 includes centralized functionality to handle accounting, taxation, and access to
                                             data across organizations, with more flexible implementation options than were
                                             available in Release 11i to meet a wider variety of business needs. While the bulk
                                             of these changes were introduced in Release 12 of Financials, customers upgrading
                                             from 11i to Release 12.1 will face the same Financials upgrade considerations as
                                             applied to the 11i to Release 12 upgrade.
                                             Many customers have asked: “How long does a Release 12.1 upgrade project take?”
                                             There is no fixed answer to the question, as a wide range of variables can affect
                                             your project’s duration. For example:
                                                •   Is your current E-Business Suite system heavily customized, requiring you
                                                to devote significant time to inventorying your custom code, evaluating Release
                                                12.1 impacts on that code, and potentially upgrading that code to apply it to
                                                Release 12.1?
                                                •   Are you combining your Release 12.1 adoption with other systems projects,
                                                such as upgrades to hardware, operating system, or database?
                                                •   Are you performing a minimal technical upgrade, or are you fully
                                                implementing new Release 12.1 functionality?
                                                •   How big is your project team, and how much of their time will be dedicated
                                                to Release 12.1 adoption?




                                                          Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 8
Many systems integrators have experience completing Release 12.1 upgrade
                                            projects with a wide range of project scopes and complexity. We recommend that
                                            you consult with Oracle Consulting Services or your systems integrator to estimate
                                            the time and effort that your particular project will require.

                                            Tip #3 – Determine Your Upgrade Approach

Many systems integrators have experience    Let’s start by distinguishing what we mean by the terms “implementing” and
completing Release 12.1 upgrade projects    “upgrading.” If you adopt Release 12.1 by implementing, you install the Release
  with a wide range of project scopes and
                                            12.1 software and implement it to reflect your enterprise structure and operating
                             complexity.
                                            practices. You then load any historical data from your legacy systems into your
                                            freshly-implemented Release 12.1 system using public interface tables and
                                            application programming interfaces (APIs) that Oracle provides. Generally, you
                                            use custom scripts to transform your historical data into a format that is compatible
                                            with those public interfaces. If the legacy system from which you migrate your
                                            historical data is an earlier release of the E-Business Suite, then your fresh
                                            implementation may be described as a “reimplementation”.
                                            If you adopt Release 12.1 by upgrading, you install the Release 12.1 software and
                                            use Oracle-supplied tools and scripts to transform your historical data in place to the
                                            new Release 12.1 data model. The standard upgrade process converts your existing
                                            setup to Release 12.1 – reimplementation is not required.
                                            If you are moving from an existing release of Oracle E-Business Suite to Release
                                            12.1, you should consider whether to perform a standard upgrade versus a
                                            reimplementation. A standard upgrade allows you to take advantage of supported
                                            tools, scripts and documentation to move your existing Release 11i setups and
                                            historical data to Release 12.1. A reimplementation, on the other hand, allows you
                                            greater flexibility in your setup and in how you migrate your historical data using
                                            supported public interfaces. It is a project that you would generally undertake with
                                            the support of a professional services provider, such as Oracle Consulting. You
                                            would consider doing a reimplementation under circumstances such as:
                                               •   You wish to change configurations that are not easily changed, such as your
                                               chart of accounts definition, costing method, or calendar.
                                               •    Your enterprise has undergone significant change in the number and
                                               structure of its business units and organizations since your original Oracle
                                               implementation. For example, you have grown through acquisition and you
                                               want to establish a new standard applications setup for all of your business units,
                                               which are currently running disparate application systems. You could freshly
                                               implement Release 12.1, and then migrate historical data from your existing
                                               businesses, even if some of those businesses were running E-Business Suite.
                                               •    You are merging several E-Business Suite instances with different charts of
                                               accounts, costing methods, or calendars into a single global instance and you
                                               would like to “start fresh”, taking full advantage of new Financials features such
                                               as secondary ledgers.




                                                         Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 9
For more upgrade versus reimplementation considerations, see “R12: Upgrade vs.
                                             Reimplementation (Financials)”, My Oracle Support Knowledge Document
                                             780989.1.

                                             Tip #4 – Determine Your Project’s Technical Scope

        Evaluate the costs and benefits of   Evaluate the costs and the benefits of separating your Release 12.1 upgrade from
separating your Release 12.1 upgrade from    other systems architecture projects, such as upgrading your hardware or your
      other systems architecture projects.
                                             operating system, or merging multiple instances into a single global instance.
                                             Some customers prefer to combine multiple systems architecture changes into a
                                             single project with a single downtime, while others prefer to phase changes across
                                             multiple projects and downtimes. The benefit of a phased approach is that you
                                             simplify your troubleshooting and minimize the business risk associated with any
                                             single project, but at the cost of more total downtime and more testing of interim
                                             states. Conversely, when you concentrate multiple systems architecture changes
                                             into a single project, you minimize downtime and testing, but you accept more
                                             complex troubleshooting and increased business risk.
                                             There is no right or wrong approach – different enterprises will make different
                                             technical scoping decisions based on how frequently their business allows a
                                             downtime, how long any single downtime can be, how much testing they typically
                                             apply to systems changes, and other considerations.
                                             For our Release 12 upgrade and associated architecture projects, Oracle took a
                                             phased approach – completing a database upgrade and an upgrade to middle tier
                                             hardware and software as separate projects, well ahead of the Release 12 upgrade.
                                             By contrast, Oracle combined the smaller 12 to 12.1 upgrade and an associated
                                             database upgrade into a single project with a single downtime – allowing us to
                                             minimize our testing effort.
                                             As part of your technical scoping exercise, investigate whether you need to upgrade
                                             your database or your operating system to the minimum level required by Release
                                             12.1. If either of these technology components needs upgrading, decide whether to
                                             perform the upgrade before versus during your Release 12.1 downtime window.
                                             (See Chapter 1, “Planning for an Upgrade”, in the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade
                                             Guide, Release 11i to 12.1.1 for information about Release 12.1 system requirements.)

                                             Tip #5 – Determine Your Project’s Functional Scope

                                             The standard upgrade moves you from 11i to Release 12.1 with the same setups
                                             and functionality, plus some additional, default functionality around tax, subledger
                                             accounting, ledgers and payments. You then have the option to implement
                                             additional new functionality either immediately, as part of the same project, or in a
                                             subsequent project.
                                             In general, consider whether to scope your Release 12.1 adoption as a single project
                                             that fully encompasses all the functional and business process changes you are
                                             targeting, or to divide your adoption into multiple projects. For example, you could
                                             simplify your Release 12.1 project by performing a minimal upgrade, versus




                                                         Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 10
upgrading and fully implementing new features to the target state. However,
                                               depending on your circumstances, you may want to scope your adoption to include
                                               all of the features that support your return on investment as a single project.
Regardless of how you adopt Release 12.1,      Regardless of how you adopt Release 12.1, it provides the foundation for over 300
it provides the foundation for over 300 new    new features. These include the Oracle Financials accounting and tax engines and
   features across all of the product areas.
                                               the multi-organization capability that were introduced in Release 12, as well as
                                               many new Release 12.1 features in the other product areas. You can analyze the
                                               new features and implement them at your own pace at any time after your upgrade.

                                               Tip #6 – Plan for Required Financials Setup Steps

                                               Even a minimal upgrade requires some setup of the new Financials features that
                                               come by default, such as Trading Community Architecture (TCA) for supplier data,
                                               Payments and E-Business Tax.
                                               Some accounting entities (such as taxes, banks and suppliers) that were modeled by
                                               several Financials products in Release 11i were moved to a common
                                               implementation starting with Release 12. If you have setup inconsistencies among
                                               Release 11i products for setups that are centralized in Release 12.1, you should
                                               resolve them before you upgrade. For example, since supplier data moved from
                                               individual product tables in Release 11i to common TCA tables starting with
                                               Release 12, you should review your 11i supplier data and remove any duplicates
                                               prior to your 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade.
                                               Furthermore, the upgrade scripts that move Release 11i Financials setups to Release
                                               12.1 are based on assumptions, detailed in the Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement
                                               Functional Upgrade Guide, of what is appropriate for most business situations. If
                                               those assumptions would lead to an outcome that is inappropriate for your business
                                               situation, plan on modifying your Release 12.1 Financials setups.
                                               You can run the Accounting Setup Manager Pre-Update Diagnosis Report to view
                                               your Release 11i setup for Multiple Reporting Currencies, General Ledger, Global
                                               Accounting Engine, Assets, Payables, and Receivables. This report identifies setups
                                               that are potentially problematic. While you can upgrade successfully without
                                               running this report and without modifying your setup, you may find it more
                                               difficult to take advantage of new Release 12.1 functionality. (See Chapter 2,
                                               “Preparing for the Upgrade”, in the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Guide, Release 11i
                                               to 12.1.1 for more information about the Accounting Setup Manager Pre-Update
                                               Diagnosis report.)

                                               Tip #7 – Avoid Upgrading Obsolete Functionality

        By removing or disabling obsolete      As part of your upgrade planning, work with your user community to identify any
functionality while you are still running on   setups, programs or seed data that you no longer use. By removing or disabling
     11i, you can reduce the scope of your
                                               this obsolete functionality while you are still running on 11i, you can reduce the
                           upgrade project.
                                               scope of your upgrade project.




                                                           Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 11
For example, prior to Oracle’s own upgrade to Release 12.1, we reviewed and
                                              standardized our setups, and we eliminated obsolete reports, alerts, responsibilities,
                                              and other data to reduce our testing and upgrade effort.

                                              Tip #8 – Determine Your Data Migration Strategy

                                              For a new E-Business Suite implementation or a reimplementation, determine a
                                              data migration strategy for historical data. Your strategy should address the scope
                                              of data to migrate, for example, “migrate all open payables and receivables
                                              invoices.” If your intended migration scope is large, consider engaging an
                                              experienced migration consultant from Oracle Consulting or one of Oracle’s
                                              partners.
                                              The Oracle Integration Repository is a complete catalog of the many E-Business
    The Oracle Integration Repository is a
                                              Suite public interfaces that you can use to migrate historical data. It is part of the
complete catalog of the many E-Business
Suite public interfaces that you can use to   Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, embedded in the applications
                   migrate historical data.   technology layer. You can access the Integration Repository by logging into your
                                              test installation of Release 12.1, choosing the Integrated SOA Gateway
                                              responsibility, and clicking the Integration Repository link.




                                              Figure 1: Integration Repository

                                              It’s important to determine whether your historical data needs cleansing to
                                              eliminate any data that is incorrect, out-of-date, redundant, incomplete, or
                                              incorrectly formatted. Typically, data that has undergone several prior upgrades or
                                              migrations can benefit from cleansing. By cleansing historical data, you can reduce
                                              data migration volume and prevent data inconsistencies in your Release 12.1
                                              system.
                                              For audit purposes, establish a method for reconciling migrated data with legacy
                                              data. For example, you could compare the outputs obtained from Release 12.1
                                              reports with the equivalent reports from your legacy system. In addition, you
                                              should validate through testing that you can successfully perform Release 12.1
                                              operations on data migrated from your legacy system.

                                              Tip #9 – Assemble a Project Team that Combines Technical and Functional Skill Sets

                                              Consider including the following people on your Release 12.1 project team:




                                                            Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 12
•    A dedicated project manager
                                                  •    An executive steering committee – to provide project oversight and make
                                                      critical decisions.
                                                  •     Business process owners – to analyze business process changes, and to
                                                      participate in end-to-end testing and end user training. For Financials
                                                      upgrades, consider including a tax specialist who knows the tax policies in the
                                                      regions where you do business.
                                                  •     Application specialists – technical specialists with functional business
                                                      knowledge who work closely with business process owners. Typically,
                                                      application specialists focus on particular product areas and perform the
                                                      related functional setups.
                                                  •    Technical team – one or more people who can function as a technical
                                                      upgrade specialist, an operating system administrator, a database
                                                      administrator, an applications server (middle tier) specialist, a performance
                                                      specialist, a change management (patching) specialist, and a customization
                                                      developer.
                                                  •    Testers – both technical and functional. You will also need someone to log
                                                      and track service requests (SRs), and a DBA to apply patches.
                                                  •    A training lead – to assist in the Release 12.1 rollout to end users
                                               If you decide to retain outside consultants to provide expertise that is lacking from
                                               your in-house team, prefer consultants with prior Release 12.1 experience. With
                                               the large number of customers either implementing or live on Releases 12 and 12.1,
                                               there is a significant pool of skilled and trained consultants. Oracle Consulting,
                                               Oracle’s partners, and Oracle’s Advanced Customer Services team offer many
                                               Release 12.1 upgrade- and implementation-related services.

                                               Tip #10 – Involve Your Business Users at Every Project Phase

                                               Several Release 12 and 12.1 adopters have commented that strong support from
                                               business users has been critical to their project success, citing the power of a
                                               “we’re-all-in-this-together” attitude.
Be sure to involve business users from the     Be sure to involve business users from the start of your project so that they are
      start of your project so that they are   prepared for Release 12.1 changes in look and process flow. Identify the functional
prepared for Release 12.1 changes in look
                                               areas where users will see the biggest changes and concentrate your training efforts
                         and process flow.
                                               there. For example, in Oracle Payables, the payments process uses a new Payments
                                               dashboard, and the Invoice workbench is significantly reworked.
                                               Plan to reinforce user learning even after your production cutover with internal
                                               documentation and job aids. Consider using Oracle’s process documentation and
                                               end user training tools, Oracle Tutor and Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK), to
                                               help with knowledge transfer to business users (see Tip #22.)




                                                            Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 13
Tip #11 – Keep Your Project Team in Place through Your First Financials Close

                                            After your Release 12.1 go-live, plan to keep your project team in place at least
                                            through your first Financials close, and ideally through your first quarterly close.
                                            Your project team can closely monitor the health of your production system,
                                            logging service requests as needed and notifying end users through broadcast e-
                                            mails of any significant issues. The project team can serve as a backup to the
                                            smaller in-house support team that normally handles end user queries.

                                            Tip #12 – Develop a Robust Testing Strategy

                                            We cannot over-emphasize the importance of testing to the success of your Release
                                            12.1 upgrade project.
                                            As for any new release, you should formulate a testing strategy that details the
                                            number of test rounds, types of testing, and who will be involved, with an overall
                                            goal of performing end-to-end testing of all business flows and scenarios. In
                                            addition to conference room pilot testing to validate setups, ensure that you do full
                                            functional testing with business users.
                                            Perform multiple rounds of testing, focusing on new and changed functionality.
                                            The number of test rounds and your acceptance criteria should be carefully
                                            considered at the outset of your project, and then reconsidered before and after
                                            each test round.
                                            The timeframe for your testing rounds should be clearly stated. Issues and slow
                                            turnaround on resolutions may affect your testing period; make sure you budget
                                            enough time for issue resolution. Agree in advance which types of issues should be
                                            considered as show-stoppers to putting Release 12.1 into production, or even to
                                            advancing to the next test round.
                                            Your testing should be guided by detailed test scripts that you prepare in advance.
                                            You can start with the test scripts used in your original implementation, updating
                                            them to reflect new Release 12.1 functionality and process changes that you intend
                                            to implement. If you do not have test scripts from your original implementation,
                                            you can create test scripts by documenting what you currently do in the system. Be
                                            sure to specify expected test results to compare against your actual test results.
   Well before your planned go-live date,   Well before your planned go-live date, begin performing test upgrades against a
begin performing test upgrades against a    copy (clone) of your existing system. Test upgrades help to establish that the
    copy (clone) of your existing system.
                                            upgrade will fit into your downtime window, and allow for tuning of upgrade
                                            scripts as needed. Also, be sure to track any upgrade impacts on your custom code.

                                            Oracle’s Testing Practices

                                            Oracle uses a standard testing flow for all systems changes. Changes are collected
                                            into release bundles that are promoted through a series of test environments, each
                                            of which runs a full-sized copy of our production database:
                                               •    Build Test – where the technical team tests changes for several weeks before
                                                   handing off to business users for testing




                                                         Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 14
•     User Acceptance Test – where business users and the technical team do
                                                     several weeks of full end-to-end testing, including regression testing of key
                                                     transaction flows.
                                                 •     Staging Test – where the technical team does final regression testing of key
                                                     transaction flows and a full dry run of the transition outage about one week
                                                     prior to production cutover.
                                              For the 11i to Release 12 upgrade, we followed our standard testing flow, but
                                              increased the number of test rounds. We also added a one-off Technical Test
                                              environment where our technical staff did simulations to identify any performance
                                              regressions, as well as iterative runs of the upgrade process to tune performance
                                              and minimize the duration. Just a week before go-live, we did a full dress rehearsal
                                              of the upgrade transition in the Staging Test environment, allowing us to get very
                                              accurate timings for our production go-live.

                                              Automated Testing Tools

                                              You can create your own functional and load test suites using Oracle Application
  You can create your own functional and
                                              Testing Suite, which is supported for use with Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 11i,
  load test suites using Oracle Application
 Testing Suite, which is supported for use    12, and 12.1.
with Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 11i,
                                              The Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS) is composed of:
                              12, and 12.1.
                                                 •    Oracle Load Testing for scalability, performance, and load testing
                                                 •    Oracle Functional Testing for automated functional and regression testing
                                                 •    Oracle Test Manager for test process management, test execution, and
                                                     defect tracking
                                              OATS uses Oracle E-Business Suite Accelerators to enable support for automated
                                              functional testing and load testing of both E-Business Suite Web- and Oracle
                                              Forms-based screens. Using the OATS graphical scripting interface, your business
                                              users can record automated test scripts by stepping through Oracle E-Business
                                              Suite business transactions, mimicking normal business operations. You can use the
                                              same interface to run scripts, parameterize script inputs, add custom test cases to
                                              validate content, and extend scripts programmatically in Java. Also using the same
                                              interface, you can create automated load test scripts that allow Oracle Load Testing
                                              to simulate thousands of concurrent virtual users.
                                              In an upgrade context, you could use the OATS tool to load test your Release 12.1
                                              test system to ensure that it adequately scales to the volume of transactions you
                                              anticipate in production, including worst-case peak loads.
                                              You can read more about the OATS solution at:
                                              http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/etest.html
                                              Additionally, Oracle provides a “Test Starter Kit” for Release 12.1.1 that uses
                                              OATS. The Test Starter Kit includes sample test scripts and an instruction guide
                                              for using the OATS automated testing tool with Oracle E-Business Suite. The




                                                           Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 15
sample test scripts were created by Oracle’s Quality Assurance team and they run
                                             against an E-Business Suite Vision Demo database. You can use the sample test
                                             scripts as a model for building your own unique portfolio of regression test suites.
                                             You can download the Test Start Kit from the Oracle Application Testing Suite site
                                             linked from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/app-
                                             testing/index.html.

                                             Tip #13 – Plan to Test with Upgraded As Well as New Data and at Full Volumes

                                             Test all of your business scenarios with documents upgraded from Release 11i as
                                             well as those created in Release 12.1. Test performing operations in Release 12.1
                                             on documents that were created in Release 11i. For example, test that an invoice
                                             created in Release 11i can have a credit memo issued against it in Release 12.1 with
                                             matching tax calculations. Or, create a payment in Release 11i, then void it in
                                             Release 12.1. This would validate that setup differences between Release 11i and
                                             12.1 do not create inconsistencies in a business document as it completes its flow.
                                             In-progress workflow items should, in general, upgrade smoothly. However,
                                             validate this with testing, especially where you have customized Release 11i pre-
                                             seeded workflow processes or activities. You could consider reducing the number
                                             of in-progress workflow items by turning off applications such as iExpenses and
                                             iProcurement for some interval prior to your upgrade, and encouraging your
                                             managers to respond to pending workflow notifications.
                                             While your initial conference room pilot testing may validate setups based on
                                             sample or demonstration data, it’s critical that you do full, end-to-end testing on the
                                             complete data set that you intend to run in production. Release 12.1 data validation
                                             is even tighter than in prior releases, so you need to find whether there are any data
                                             conditions that would fail Release 12.1 validation.
  Oracle recommends that you test your       In particular, Oracle recommends that during user acceptance testing, you test your
   month-end and quarter-end close and       month-end and quarter-end close and reconciliation with full data volumes, and
reconciliation with full data volumes, and
                                             that you resolve any exceptions. Additionally, once you go live, consider simulating
        that you resolve any exceptions.
                                             a month-end close a few days before your first actual month-end close.

                                             Tip #14 – Plan to Do Load and Volume Testing

                                             Because new reports and business processes may be sensitive to your data
                                             distribution, and to ensure that your system has the expected performance
                                             characteristics, make sure you do load and volume testing.

                                             Oracle’s Load and Volume Testing

                                             Oracle’s Applications IT team has learned from experience that doing adequate
                                             performance testing of any system change is critical. Even for regularly scheduled
                                             small-to-medium changes, Oracle does automated load and volume testing,
                                             simulating heavy system usage. For a project as major as an E-Business Suite
                                             upgrade, we do even more load and stress testing.




                                                         Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 16
For our Release 12 upgrade, Oracle did “batch load tests,” replaying concurrent
                                              requests pulled from production against a test copy of an upgraded database. This
                                              allowed our technical staff to study the behavior of reports running with different
                                              parameter settings and to detect any performance regressions.
                                              In addition, Oracle has found that there is no substitute for letting end users loose
                                              on a test environment to introduce a diverse and unexpected mix of transactions
                                              and batch load. That’s why, in addition to doing scripted regression testing, Oracle
                                              did a six-hour “User Participation Test” on a Release 12 environment configured
                                              with full production processing capacity. While IT and business users bombarded
                                              the system with transactions and batch processes, Oracle’s DBAs studied the
                                              system, looking for stress points and unexpected behaviors.
                                              Even with all of this pre- go-live testing, Oracle took the precautionary step of
                                              defining special concurrent manager queues into which we could move any jobs
                                              that demonstrated performance issues after go-live. By isolating these jobs in
                                              special queues, we could control the resources they consumed and ensure that they
                                              did not have a detrimental impact on our business.

                                              Additional Performance Advice

                                              Oracle’s Applications Performance team recommends that Release 12.1 upgrade
                                              customers who are already live on Release 11g of the database, or those who are
                                              combining their applications upgrade with an 11g database upgrade follow the
                                              advice in the “Upgrade to 11g Performance Best Practices” white paper at
                                              My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 1100303.1. This paper offers advice on
                                              optimizing the 11g database upgrade process, highlighting 11g features that you can
                                              use to performance-test the Release 12.1 database workload, as well as avoid
                                              potential performance issues.

                                              Tip #15 – Engage with Oracle Support

Ensure that you have ready access to the      Ensure that you have ready access to the My Oracle Support portal at
  My Oracle Support portal, and that you      https://support.oracle.com, and that you understand and leverage the information,
understand and leverage the information,
                                              tools, and services that are available to you there. In particular, Oracle
  tools, and services that are available to
                                              recommends that you download and install the Oracle Configuration Manager
                                you there.
                                              (OCM), a support tool that allows Oracle to more proactively assist you with your
                                              upgrade, as well as with ongoing operations once your upgrade is complete.
                                              Using Oracle Configuration Manager, you can upload the configuration of your
                                              Oracle computing environment. You can associate your configuration with
                                              information about your upgrade project that you upload via My Oracle Support.
                                              Having knowledge of both your configuration and your project allows Oracle’s
                                              support engineers to proactively suggest solutions and resolve issues, while being
                                              sensitive to critical events in your business that could affect your upgrade.
                                              The Oracle Configuration Manager includes a data collector that is designed to
                                              track key Oracle and system parameters for each host on which it runs. The
                                              collected data is sent via secure HTTPS to My Oracle Support, where we maintain a




                                                          Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 17
secure and updated view of each host’s configuration. Oracle collects only
configuration information, such as installed patches; deployment dates, versions,
and type; deployed components and applications; configuration files; and network
configurations. Using the collected information, My Oracle Support provides
security and product alerts, patch advice, and system health checks that are specific
to your computing environment.
To learn more about the Oracle Configuration Manager and the automated services
it provides, click the “Collector” link under the “More” tab on the My Oracle
Support portal. To view the full catalog of system health checks available via the
Oracle Configuration Manager, see the “My Oracle Support Health Checks
Catalog” at My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 868955.1.




Figure 2: Oracle Configuration Manager: Collector

You may also wish to take advantage of the highly personalized services available
from Oracle’s Solution Support Center, part of Oracle’s Advanced Customer
Services team. For example, one of our enterprise customers described engaging
with Oracle’s Solution Support Center at the start of their Release 12.1 upgrade
project. The Solution Support Center performed a “Customer Success
Assessment”, and based on that recommended a catalog of services, including
customized training and knowledge transfer. In addition, the Solution Support
Center joined with the customer’s hardware vendor to evaluate the customer’s
topology, hardware, and software – which resulted in a change to the customer’s
planned CPU and memory configuration. In this case, the customer found it
beneficial to engage an on-site “Solution Support Center Engineer” who worked
alongside of the in-house project team.




              Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 18
Tip #16 – Develop an Issue Resolution Strategy

Develop an issue resolution strategy that spells out how you will address issues that
arise during testing. In particular, Oracle recommends that you define an incident
resolution flow for handling issues internally before you log them as service
requests. Most customers find it helpful to maintain a prioritized issues list,
tracking the details of all open and resolved issues encountered during their
upgrade project.
Be sure to designate who will troubleshoot and characterize issues, and who will log
and track Service Requests (SRs). If you are using the Oracle Configuration
Manager, you can automatically associate a configuration with your Service Request
and save the effort of manually entering configuration data.
We also recommend that you install tools such as Oracle Application Management
Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, or Oracle Applications Manager. These tools
can proactively monitor your Oracle E-Business Suite test and production systems,
sending informational alerts to warn your system administrators of any incidents.
You can also set up these tools to take corrective action on common issues and
reduce the impact of any incidents. For more details on the Oracle Application
Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, see My Oracle Support Knowledge
Document 982302.1, “Getting Started with Oracle Application Management Pack
and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite”. For
more on the Oracle Applications Manager, see the Oracle E-Business Suite System
Administrator's Guide Documentation Set.
Additionally, set up the Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics framework and
understand how to use it so that you can transmit diagnostic reports to Oracle
Support (see Tip #17 for more information.)
To learn more about working with Oracle Support to resolve issues, see My Oracle
Support Knowledge Document 166650.1, “Working Effectively with Global
Customer Support.” Also see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 199389.1
for advice on “Escalating Service Requests with Oracle Support Services”.

Tip #17 – Take Advantage of Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics

Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics consist of a toolset and tests to help you
collect and analyze information about E-Business Suite setup and processing issues.
You can use these diagnostics after each test upgrade to identify and troubleshoot
any issues. Once you are satisfied with the outcome of your test upgrades, it’s a
good idea to save your diagnostic output so that you can compare it with the
diagnostic output that you get just after your production upgrade. You can also use
the diagnostics after you go live to help troubleshoot any issues that may arise.
Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics are easy to use, designed for both functional
and technical users. The diagnostic tests do not alter your setup or transactional
data in any way. They enable you to avoid issues, resolve issues on your own, or




            Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 19
obtain diagnostic output that you can upload with a Service Request to speed
                                               Oracle’s resolution of your issue.
                                               Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics are automatically installed with Release 12.1,
                                               and the latest versions of the toolset and tests are available through a standard
                                               patch. See My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 342459.1 for more
                                               information.

                                               Tip #18 – Inventory Your Customizations and Prioritize Them for Upgrade

        Inventory your customizations and      Inventory your customizations and determine which functions could be replaced by
       determine which functions could be      standard product in Release 12.1. A major 11i customer with several thousand
  replaced by standard product in Release
                                               customizations observed that at least half of those were already built into Release
                                       12.1.
                                               12.1, eliminating the need for forward-porting.
                                               Be sure to consider the many user interface (UI) improvements in Release 12.1 as
                                               you evaluate customizations for retirement. In particular, notice the reduction in
                                               pop-ups and duplicate screens, the redesigned and streamlined workflows, the
                                               reduced number of steps to complete key tasks, and the improved overall look and
                                               feel. Also consider how you can leverage Release 12.1’s increased personalization
                                               capabilities. To learn more about these 12.1 UI and personalization enhancements,
                                               see the Release Content Document for Application Technology (linked from My
                                               Oracle Support Knowledge Document 561580.1.)
                                               For international deployments, review country localization features, new starting
                                               with Release 12, that may simplify or replace your customizations (See My Oracle
                                               Support Knowledge Document 429042.1.)
  Validate with your business users which      For any customizations that remain, validate with your business users which
customizations are most critical to them so    customizations are most critical to them so that you can prioritize your upgrade
that you can prioritize your upgrade effort.
                                               effort. It may be possible to defer the implementation of some customizations
                                               until after the initial upgrade project.
                                               You may wish to consider engaging Oracle Consulting or an Oracle partner to
                                               execute a detailed CEMLI (Customization, Extension, Modification, Localization,
                                               and Integration) framework review. This should be done to assist in properly
                                               planning your upgrade program.

                                               Assessing the Impact of Database Changes to Your Custom Code

                                               You should review the impact of changes to database objects on your custom code.
                                               In particular, note that starting with Release 12, the backward-compatible views
                                               RA_CUSTOMERS and RA_ADDRESSES are no longer available, so you should
                                               change any custom code that references them to reference the relevant Trading
                                               Community Architecture (TCA) tables instead.
                                               Oracle documents database changes for each major release. Database changes
                                               from 11i.10 to 12 are highlighted in product-specific “Technical Overviews” that
                                               are part of the “Release 12 Transfer of Information Online Training” (see My
                                               Oracle Support Knowledge Document 988725.1.) Database changes from Release




                                                           Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 20
12 to 12.1 are listed in product-specific Release Notes that are linked from “Oracle
                                              Applications Documentation Resources, Release 12.1” (see My Oracle Support
                                              Knowledge Document 790942.1.)
       The Electronic Technical Reference     Another resource that can help you understand database changes is the Electronic
   Manual (eTRM) documents the full data      Technical Reference Manual (eTRM), which documents the full data model for
model for Release 12.1, as well as the data
                                              Release 12.1, as well as the data models for prior releases. You can access the
                models for prior releases.
                                              eTRM at https://etrm.oracle.com, or from My Oracle Support Knowledge
                                              Document 150230.1.

                                              Adapting Your Custom Code to Architecture and Technology Changes

                                              Custom code developed using standard Release 11i development technologies
                                              (such as Oracle Forms, Oracle Application Framework, and Oracle Workflow) and
                                              built according to Oracle’s customization standards is, in general, compatible with
                                              the Release 12.1 technology stack. In particular, you should be able to run your
                                              custom forms on Release 12.1 after regenerating them using the latest certified
                                              version of the Oracle Forms Migration Assistant. For more information on the
                                              Forms Migration Assistant and Oracle’s customization standards, see the Oracle E-
                                              Business Suite Developer’s Guide, Release 12.1.
                                              Note that starting with Release 12, Oracle E-Business Suite migrated to new
                                              technologies from these now-deprecated technologies:
                                                 •   mod_plsql
                                                 •   Oracle Reports Server Reports
                                                 •   Oracle Graphics integrations with Oracle Forms
                                                 •   AK mode of Oracle Application Framework
                                              If you did custom development using any of these deprecated technologies,
                                              consider whether to migrate to newer technologies while you are still running your
                                              current E-Business Suite release, or to defer migration until your Release 12.1
                                              upgrade downtime. See “Preparing Custom Development for the Next Oracle
                                              Applications E-Business Suite Release” (My Oracle Support Knowledge Document
                                              374398.1) for a discussion of migration alternatives for the deprecated technologies.
                                              In addition, Release 12 introduced support for Multiple Organizations Access
                                              Control (MOAC), which enables access to data in multiple organizations from a
                                              single responsibility. See My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 420787.1 to
                                              learn how to MOAC-enable your custom forms, Oracle Application Framework
                                              pages, concurrent programs, and reports.
                                              Planning for Re-implemented Customizations

                                              Of your remaining customizations, identify those that you can move with minimal
                                              investment versus those that you need to re-implement. For example, you must re-
                                              implement customizations that were developed using now-deprecated technologies.




                                                          Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 21
You may also need to re-factor or refine customizations that are partially replaced
                                              by Release 12.1 functionality or that are affected by significant data model changes.
                                              For any customizations that you decide to re-implement, carefully consider your
                                              approach. Wherever possible, use E-Business Suite personalization functionality –
                                              which includes flexfields, folders, and the OA Personalization Framework – to
                                              tailor the applications to your needs.
                                              Customizing with OA Personalization Framework

                                              Using the OA Personalization Framework, you can declaratively modify the user
 Using the OA Personalization Framework,
                                              interface of OA Framework pages to produce immediate, visual feedback of
     you can declaratively modify the user
      interface of OA Framework pages to      changes. For example, you can:
    produce immediate, visual feedback of
                                                 •   hide or show page items or regions
                                 changes.
                                                 •   add new items
                                                 •   change prompts, titles and text
                                                 •   re-order items or regions
                                                 •   make items required
                                              With OA Personalization Framework, there is no impact to the base page
                                              definition, and no need for a separate development tool. Additionally, any changes
                                              that you make are upgrade-safe – patching the base page does not affect existing
                                              user interface personalizations.
                                              However, using OA Personalization Framework, you cannot build new pages or
                                              modify existing business logic such as data validations, and you have limited ability
                                              to change existing page flows. If you must extend the E-Business Suite
                                              applications, use either the standard E-Business Suite development tools or the
                                              latest Fusion Middleware development tools.
                                              Extending with Oracle’s E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware Development Tools

                                              For extensions that are incremental to existing business flows, where users expect
    For extensions that are incremental to
                                              the standard E-Business Suite user experience, consider using the standard E-
     existing business flows, where users
expect the standard E-Business Suite user     Business Suite development technologies. These include Oracle Application
experience, consider using the standard E-    Framework (using the OA Extension to JDeveloper 10g), Oracle Forms, Oracle BI
Business Suite development technologies.      Publisher, and Oracle Workflow. With these tools, you can leverage the same
                                              coding standards and user interface components that we use internally at Oracle to
                                              create extensions that are tightly integrated with the E-Business Suite. There are
                                              also some features, such as flexfields, that are only available on the standard E-
                                              Business Suite technology stack.
                                              For self-contained extensions, targeted to users who do not require the standard E-
 For self-contained extensions, targeted to
                                              Business Suite user experience, consider using the latest Fusion Middleware
 users who do not require the standard E-
 Business Suite user experience, consider     technologies. These include the Application Development Framework (ADF),
       using the latest Fusion Middleware     Oracle WebCenter, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise
                             technologies.    Edition (OBIEE). With these tools, you can extend the value of your current




                                                          Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 22
applications while gaining valuable IT and operational skills that you will need to
prepare for Oracle’s next-generation, Fusion Middleware-based applications. For
example, you can:
   •    Create a composite application spanning E-Business Suite and one or more
       other applications (packaged or custom.)
   •    Create an advanced user interface leveraging the AJAX UI capabilities of
       ADF.
   •     Develop a self-service extension to E-Business Suite for “casual” or
       “infrequent” users of the system who are unconcerned about UI consistency.
       For example, using ADF you could create a simplified, efficient user
       interface, launched from the EBS home page, which allows users to submit
       requisitions but not access the entire E-Business Suite. (For additional
       examples of ADF self-service extensions, see “The Evolutionary Path:
       Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications” at
       http://www.oracle.com/applications/evolutionary-path-to-fusion.pdf)
Releases 12.1.2 and 12.1.3 provide additional functionality that allows you to
flexibly combine E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware development
technologies. For example, you can embed rich content – such as OBIEE analytics
or an ADF task flow – into an OAF page to produce an advanced UI. For more
on this topic, see the Release Content Document for Application Technology,
linked from My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 561580.1.
For more on Oracle Fusion Middleware and the many benefits it provides to the E-
Business Suite, see the following white papers:
   •    “Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware”,
       http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/applications/ebs/whyfmwisb
       estmiddlewareforebs.pdf
   •    “Application Upgrades and SOA”,
       http://www.oracle.com/technologies/soa/docs/soa-application-
       upgrades.pdf

Tip #19 – Consider Migrating Your Reports to Business Intelligence Publisher

Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle BI Publisher), formerly known as
XML Publisher, is an enterprise reporting solution for authoring, managing and
delivering all types of highly-formatted documents. End users can easily design
report layouts (“templates”) using familiar desktop tools, such as Microsoft Word,
Microsoft Excel, or Adobe Acrobat. BI Publisher can query or accept data from
practically any data source – databases, packaged applications, web services, HTTP
feeds, or file data sources. At runtime, BI Publisher merges template files with
XML data to produce a wide variety of formatted outputs, including:




             Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 23
•     Customer-ready PDF documents, such as financial statements, marketing
                                                    materials, contracts, invoices, and purchase orders using colors, images, font
                                                    styles, headers, footers, and other formatting and design options.
                                                •    HTML output for optimum online viewing.
                                                •    Excel output to create a spreadsheet of your report data.
                                                •     "Filled-out" third-party provided PDF documents. For example, you can
                                                    use a government form in PDF as a template. At runtime, your data and
                                                    template merge to produce a "filled-out" form.
                                                •     Flat text files to exchange with business partners for EDI and EFT
                                                    transmission.
                                             BI Publisher was used in Release 11i.10 for high-fidelity formatting of many
                                             external documents. With Release 12, many more standard reports used BI
                                             Publisher, and with Release 12.1 nearly all reports use it. For BI Publisher-based
                                             reports, an XML data extract is provided along with a default layout (template) that
                                             you can easily modify.
                                             We recommend that you convert any custom reports based on mod_plsql to BI
     We recommend that you convert any
                                             Publisher. Consider converting your custom Oracle Reports reports to BI
 custom reports based on mod_plsql to BI
     Publisher. Consider converting your     Publisher, as well. If you move your custom reports to BI Publisher before
      custom Oracle Reports reports to BI    upgrading to Release 12.1, you may need to adjust the queries you use to produce
                        Publisher as well.   the report output, but your formatting will remain valid for Release 12.1.
                                             Oracle provides a migration utility to facilitate the conversion of Oracle Reports to
                                             BI Publisher reports. The conversion process takes an Oracle Reports RDF file,
                                             which embeds both data extraction logic and report layout, and converts it to the
                                             separate data extract and layout objects necessary for a BI Publisher report. To
                                             learn more about the migration process, see Appendix D, “Oracle Report to XML
                                             Publisher Report Migration” in the Oracle XML Publisher Administration and
                                             Developer’s Guide, Release 12.

                                             Tip #20 – Review Your Integrations and Consider Modernizing Them

                                             As you inventory your custom code, also inventory your integrations and make a
    Consider whether certain integrations
                                             plan to re-test and re-tune them. Consider whether certain integrations would be
would be easier to maintain and upgrade if
they were modernized using tools from the    easier to maintain and upgrade if they were modernized using tools from the
                 Fusion Middleware Suite.    Fusion Middleware Suite. For example, look for “brittle” integrations or needless
                                             data replications, including:
                                                •     Integrations implemented using database synchronization (for example,
                                                    DBLink), which depend upon a particular database schema and circumvent
                                                    the application’s own validation logic.
                                                •     Integrations implemented “point to point”, where data is transformed as it
                                                    moves between different data schemas used by different applications that
                                                    may be evolving independently from one another. Today’s best practice is to
                                                    leverage a canonical, application-independent data model that can act as a




                                                          Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 24
hub for all integrations. Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is
                                                  Oracle's product offering that implements a best practice canonical service
                                                  model.
                                              •    Complex integrations implemented using programmatic, hard-to-debug
                                                  procedures, such as those based on PLSQL, versus integrations implemented
                                                  declaratively, for example using a visual BPEL process flow.
                                              •    Integrations completed as batches, which are less resilient to exception and
                                                  error handling.
                                           Decide if you should take the opportunity of the Release 12.1 upgrade or a
                                           companion project to re-implement any problem integrations. Oracle Fusion
                                           Middleware components, such as Oracle SOA Suite, can help you leverage the real-
                                           time integration capabilities made possible through the service-enablement of the
                                           E-Business Suite achieved through the Integrated SOA Gateway. In addition,
                                           Oracle Data Integrator can be leveraged for batch-style data integrations.
                                           We also suggest that you use Oracle B2B instead of Oracle EDI Gateway or Oracle
                                           XML Gateway to develop any new B2B integrations.

                                           Tip #21 – Reexamine User Roles and Responsibilities and Business Processes

    You should reexamine user roles and    You should reexamine user roles and responsibilities due to business process
responsibilities due to business process   changes introduced starting with Release 12. For example, who should be
changes introduced starting with Release
                                           responsible for any issues related to the new tax and subledger engines? Who will
                                     12.
                                           read and interpret the related exception reports?
                                           You should also consider whether users have access to data and functions that are
                                           incompatible with each other from a segregation of duties (SOD) perspective.
                                           Starting with Release 12, the Oracle Applications Access Controls Governor
                                           provides the ability to analyze the entire access model, from “roles” and
                                           “responsibilities” down to the “functions” (secured operations) in the Oracle E-
                                           Business Suite. In addition, with Enterprise Transaction Controls Governor, you
                                           can evaluate all business transactions to see if any SOD violations have, in fact,
                                           occurred.
                                           With Oracle Applications Access Controls Governor, you can designate any
                                           combination of incompatible access points (roles, responsibilities, menus, or
                                           functions.) The application can then report occurrences of users with incompatible
                                           access points so that managers can modify the privileges and tasks assigned to
                                           them. Included with Applications Access Controls Governor is the ability to ask
                                           “what if?” or to simulate changes to the authorization model (menus, sub-menus,
                                           responsibilities, and so on), and to include approval steps before assigning access
                                           rights that represent an SOD risk.




                                                        Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1   Page 25
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1
Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1

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Planning Guide for Upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 11i to 12.1

  • 1. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 An Oracle White Paper January 2011
  • 2. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 4  Business Value of Upgrading to Release 12.1 ............................................... 5  Release 12 Value Proposition ................................................................. 5  Release 12.1 Value Proposition.............................................................. 6  Upgrade Planning Tips ..................................................................................... 8  Tip #1 – Target Release 12.1 for Your Upgrade................................. 8  Tip #2 – Allocate Enough Time and Resources to Your Project .... 8  Tip #3 – Determine Your Upgrade Approach.................................... 9  Tip #4 – Determine Your Project’s Technical Scope ...................... 10  Tip #5 – Determine Your Project’s Functional Scope .................... 10  Tip #6 – Plan for Required Financials Setup Steps .......................... 11  Tip #7 – Avoid Upgrading Obsolete Functionality.......................... 11  Tip #8 – Determine Your Data Migration Strategy ......................... 12  Tip #9 – Assemble a Project Team that Combines Technical and Functional Skill Sets............................................................................... 12  Tip #10 – Involve Your Business Users at Every Project Phase ... 13  Tip #11 – Keep Your Project Team in Place through Your First Financials Close ...................................................................................... 14  Tip #12 – Develop a Robust Testing Strategy .................................. 14  Tip #13 – Plan to Test with Upgraded As Well as New Data and at Full Volumes........................................................................................... 16  Tip #14 – Plan to Do Load and Volume Testing............................. 16  Tip #15 – Engage with Oracle Support ............................................. 17  Tip #16 – Develop an Issue Resolution Strategy.............................. 19  Tip #17 – Take Advantage of Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics .............................................................................................. 19 Tip #18 – Inventory Your Customizations and Prioritize Them for Upgrade ................................................................................................... 20  Tip #19 – Consider Migrating Your Reports to Business Intelligence Publisher............................................................................. 23  Tip #20 – Review Your Integrations and Consider Modernizing Them ........................................................................................................ 24  Tip #21 – Reexamine User Roles and Responsibilities and Business Processes.................................................................................................. 25  Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 2
  • 3. Tip #22 – Consider Using Oracle’s Process Documentation and End User Training Tools ...................................................................... 26  Tip #23 – Acquire Release 12.1 Knowledge...................................... 27  Tip #24 – Fully Utilize Available Upgrade Information.................. 29  Tip #25 – Consider Using the Maintenance Wizard ........................ 30  Tip #26 – Take Steps to Minimize Downtime.................................. 31  Tip #27 – Identify Required and Recommended Pre- and Post- Upgrade Patches..................................................................................... 34  Tip #28 – Review your System for Compliance with Security Best Practices ................................................................................................... 35  Tip #29 – After Your Go-Live, Stay Current with Latest Code..... 35  Tip #30 – After Your Go-Live, Stay Current with Latest Information ............................................................................................. 35  My Oracle Support Knowledge Document References ....................... 37  Change Record ............................................................................................ 38  Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 3
  • 4. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 INTRODUCTION This white paper offers best practice advice to customers currently on Release 11i who are planning a Release 12.1 upgrade. IT professionals involved with planning, managing, or running a Release 12.1 upgrade project are the primary audience. This paper combines advice from professionals in Oracle’s Support, Consulting, IT, and Development organizations with real-life lessons learned from customers who are already live on Release 12.1. In a nutshell, this paper tells you “things you wished you knew” before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. Following a brief overview of the Release 12.1 upgrade value proposition, this paper launches into specific upgrade planning tips to help you: • Understand the factors that can affect your project’s duration • Decide your project scope, and avoid missteps that can needlessly increase your scope • Assemble the right project team • Develop a robust testing strategy • Upgrade your custom code • Minimize your upgrade downtime • Leverage all of the Oracle Support resources that are available to you • Identify the Oracle tools that can improve your upgrade and maintenance experience • Become familiar with the full range of Oracle’s information resources This white paper is intended to be a living document. As we gather additional Release 12.1 upgrade planning advice, we will revise and re-publish it as My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 987516.1. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 4
  • 5. BUSINESS VALUE OF UPGRADING TO RELEASE 12.1 Release 12, which became available in January 2007, included major architectural improvements to the Financials products to support global and shared service operations, improve operational efficiencies, and reduce risk. It also incorporated the latest revisions to Oracle’s middleware and database technologies. Release 12.1, which became available in May 2009, rounds out Release 12 with significant enhancements to the other product areas, including Procurement, Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, Customer Relationship Management and Master Data Management. It also contains usability improvements and centralized life cycle management. Release 12 Value Proposition Release 12 introduced a new centralized Release 12 introduced a new centralized architecture that improves support for architecture that improves support for shared services while standardizing and simplifying the financial infrastructure shared services while standardizing and across your enterprise. It supports the centralization of the following key business simplifying the financial infrastructure functions: across your enterprise. • Accounting policies are standardized across the entire enterprise with Subledger Accounting, ensuring adherence to the same set of accounting rules. • Financial results are stored and easily accessible with Ledgers and Ledger Sets to support faster and simpler period end closing. • Legal entities easily model legal corporate structures and tie all related components together with Legal Entity Configurator. • Banks and bank accounts are centrally managed, providing a single point of access for internal bank accounts across Oracle applications. • Payments are centrally disbursed and captured with Oracle Payments, automating and streamlining integration with external financial institutions. • Transaction taxes are consistently managed and processed with E-Business Tax, which offers consistent support and control of complex transactional tax requirements across the enterprise. • Inter- and Intra-company accounts are centrally defined with the Advanced Global Intercompany System to improve period end reconciliation. Release 12 also introduced improvements in end user productivity, including dashboards, step-by-step checklists, wizard-like pages, and consolidated single-page setups in these and other product areas: • Collections • Payments • Accounting Setup • Tax Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 5
  • 6. Release 12 made producing all types of reports much easier – whether reports that include images, charts, multiple fonts and colors, board quality financial statements or government mandated forms. By delivering reports using Business Intelligence Publisher – which uses an extract and template model – we put the capability to format and deliver reports in the hands of business users, and enabled our customers’ compliance with local reporting obligations. In addition, Release 12 included enhancements across the Financials products to support global business growth at lower cost with more control and flexibility. Below is a sample of the more than 300 new features and enhancements introduced in Release 12: • Replacement for disabled accounts • Invoice line level entry and approval • Partial period revenue recognition • COGS and revenue matching • Line level cash applications • Conversion of delinquent receivables to payment plans • Funds optimization with cash pooling and zero balancing • Bank account-level reconciliation options and tolerances • Rollback on select assets with Automatic Depreciation Rollback • Streamlined receipts management with receipts tracking and receipts missing capabilities Release 12.1 Value Proposition Release 12.1 rounds out Release 12 with Release 12.1 rounds out Release 12 with significant enhancements to all of the significant enhancements to all of the other product areas. Some key new features in Release 12.1 and in related analytics other product areas. and integration solutions are: • Sourcing enhancements to streamline sourcing processes, enforce compliance and reduce risk, and achieve sustained savings; these include Excel integration to run what-if analysis, Earnest Money Deposits, two-stage evaluation of Request for Proposal (RFP), and Cost Factors and Price Factors; new capabilities such as spend classification and analysis have also been added • High volume warehouse operations support, including advanced wave planning, demand-based forward pick replenishment, and integration with Oracle Transportation Management • Optimization of supply, demand and design chains with the new Value Chain Planning solutions in Oracle Supply Chain Management • Talent Management improvements, including summarization of all talent information in a single user-friendly Talent Profile page, recruitment dashboards, Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 6
  • 7. interview management, learner groups and mandatory enrollment in Learning Management, objectives management and line of sight/cascading of objectives in performance management; also, a new succession planning module, as well as continued support for Global HR and Payrolls • Ability to view fully-loaded estimated costs (including transportation, duties, and taxes) across the complete supply chain with Oracle Landed Cost Management • Ability to manage vendor rebates and special price requests and have complete visibility into the ROI for promotional funds and the effect of supplier price changes with Oracle Supplier Ship & Debit and Price Protection for Wholesale Distribution • Ability to manage cash flow and payment holds and to ensure that subcontractors satisfy contract deliverables with Subcontractor Payments for Engineering & Construction, Utilities, Oil & Gas, Telecommunications and anyone else We continue to add new functionality to Release 12.1 on a regular basis. For example, we provided release update packs (RUPs) in December 2009 (12.1.2) and again in August 2010 (12.1.3). These RUPs contain statutory and regulatory updates as well as enhancements across the E-Business Suite product areas. Key highlights include enhancements in Service and Field Service and in Supplier Lifecycle Management, and improvements in usability and user experience. More specifically, we delivered: • Service and Field Service Dispatch Enhancements for improved Dispatch Center Workbench Task Management, Mobile Field Service technician screen personalization and auto sync; Additional Cost factor Support for more effective Scheduling of Technicians; Partnership with Trimble for GPS Support; and optimized and streamlined Service Request Creation & Management for faster data entry • Supplier Lifecycle Management and Supplier Data Hub to support extended supplier registration, profiling and performance management, along with Master Data Management capabilities such as de-duping and merging • Usability enhancements across the E-Business Suite, including Web 2.0 controls such as mouse-over and pop-ups, in-line editing of attachments, and look-ahead searching, as well as support for embedding rich content such as business intelligence reports, dashboards, and so on. Extending the overall 12.1 release, we introduced two new products – Supplier Lifecycle Management and Supplier Data Hub. We also released new and enhanced Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) integrations; and two new analytical applications – Incentive Compensation Analytics and Spend Classification. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 7
  • 8. UPGRADE PLANNING TIPS Tip #1 – Target Release 12.1 for Your Upgrade Any customer beginning an 11i upgrade Any customer beginning an 11i upgrade project or planning a new installation of project or planning a new installation of Oracle E-Business Suite should target Release 12.1. While customers can expect Oracle E-Business Suite should target the same support service level for Release 12 as for Release 12.1, Release 12.1 has a Release 12.1. longer support horizon and will be the basis for all future enhancements. If you are already in progress with an upgrade to Release 12 – unless you are in the late stages of stabilizing on the release, we recommend that you consider changing your target to Release 12.1. Several customers already underway with an 11i to Release 12 upgrade were able to cut over to Release 12.1 without a material impact on their budget or schedule. One enterprise changed direction from 12 to 12.1 just two months prior to their planned go-live and still made their original go-live date. If you are already live on Release 12, we encourage you to consider an upgrade to Release 12.1. While the Release 12 to 12.1 Financials upgrade has very minor impacts, the functional advances in other product areas are compelling and mostly incremental, posing a minimal disruption to your Release 12 deployment. Tip #2 – Allocate Enough Time and Resources to Your Project Plan for your 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade Plan for your 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade to require more time and resources than to require more time and resources than were required for E-Business Suite maintenance pack upgrades, such as the upgrade were required for E-Business Suite from 11.5.9 to 11.5.10. An 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade involves significant changes maintenance pack upgrades, such as the in data model and functionality, especially in the Financials product area. Release upgrade from 11.5.9 to 11.5.10. 12.1 includes centralized functionality to handle accounting, taxation, and access to data across organizations, with more flexible implementation options than were available in Release 11i to meet a wider variety of business needs. While the bulk of these changes were introduced in Release 12 of Financials, customers upgrading from 11i to Release 12.1 will face the same Financials upgrade considerations as applied to the 11i to Release 12 upgrade. Many customers have asked: “How long does a Release 12.1 upgrade project take?” There is no fixed answer to the question, as a wide range of variables can affect your project’s duration. For example: • Is your current E-Business Suite system heavily customized, requiring you to devote significant time to inventorying your custom code, evaluating Release 12.1 impacts on that code, and potentially upgrading that code to apply it to Release 12.1? • Are you combining your Release 12.1 adoption with other systems projects, such as upgrades to hardware, operating system, or database? • Are you performing a minimal technical upgrade, or are you fully implementing new Release 12.1 functionality? • How big is your project team, and how much of their time will be dedicated to Release 12.1 adoption? Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 8
  • 9. Many systems integrators have experience completing Release 12.1 upgrade projects with a wide range of project scopes and complexity. We recommend that you consult with Oracle Consulting Services or your systems integrator to estimate the time and effort that your particular project will require. Tip #3 – Determine Your Upgrade Approach Many systems integrators have experience Let’s start by distinguishing what we mean by the terms “implementing” and completing Release 12.1 upgrade projects “upgrading.” If you adopt Release 12.1 by implementing, you install the Release with a wide range of project scopes and 12.1 software and implement it to reflect your enterprise structure and operating complexity. practices. You then load any historical data from your legacy systems into your freshly-implemented Release 12.1 system using public interface tables and application programming interfaces (APIs) that Oracle provides. Generally, you use custom scripts to transform your historical data into a format that is compatible with those public interfaces. If the legacy system from which you migrate your historical data is an earlier release of the E-Business Suite, then your fresh implementation may be described as a “reimplementation”. If you adopt Release 12.1 by upgrading, you install the Release 12.1 software and use Oracle-supplied tools and scripts to transform your historical data in place to the new Release 12.1 data model. The standard upgrade process converts your existing setup to Release 12.1 – reimplementation is not required. If you are moving from an existing release of Oracle E-Business Suite to Release 12.1, you should consider whether to perform a standard upgrade versus a reimplementation. A standard upgrade allows you to take advantage of supported tools, scripts and documentation to move your existing Release 11i setups and historical data to Release 12.1. A reimplementation, on the other hand, allows you greater flexibility in your setup and in how you migrate your historical data using supported public interfaces. It is a project that you would generally undertake with the support of a professional services provider, such as Oracle Consulting. You would consider doing a reimplementation under circumstances such as: • You wish to change configurations that are not easily changed, such as your chart of accounts definition, costing method, or calendar. • Your enterprise has undergone significant change in the number and structure of its business units and organizations since your original Oracle implementation. For example, you have grown through acquisition and you want to establish a new standard applications setup for all of your business units, which are currently running disparate application systems. You could freshly implement Release 12.1, and then migrate historical data from your existing businesses, even if some of those businesses were running E-Business Suite. • You are merging several E-Business Suite instances with different charts of accounts, costing methods, or calendars into a single global instance and you would like to “start fresh”, taking full advantage of new Financials features such as secondary ledgers. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 9
  • 10. For more upgrade versus reimplementation considerations, see “R12: Upgrade vs. Reimplementation (Financials)”, My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 780989.1. Tip #4 – Determine Your Project’s Technical Scope Evaluate the costs and benefits of Evaluate the costs and the benefits of separating your Release 12.1 upgrade from separating your Release 12.1 upgrade from other systems architecture projects, such as upgrading your hardware or your other systems architecture projects. operating system, or merging multiple instances into a single global instance. Some customers prefer to combine multiple systems architecture changes into a single project with a single downtime, while others prefer to phase changes across multiple projects and downtimes. The benefit of a phased approach is that you simplify your troubleshooting and minimize the business risk associated with any single project, but at the cost of more total downtime and more testing of interim states. Conversely, when you concentrate multiple systems architecture changes into a single project, you minimize downtime and testing, but you accept more complex troubleshooting and increased business risk. There is no right or wrong approach – different enterprises will make different technical scoping decisions based on how frequently their business allows a downtime, how long any single downtime can be, how much testing they typically apply to systems changes, and other considerations. For our Release 12 upgrade and associated architecture projects, Oracle took a phased approach – completing a database upgrade and an upgrade to middle tier hardware and software as separate projects, well ahead of the Release 12 upgrade. By contrast, Oracle combined the smaller 12 to 12.1 upgrade and an associated database upgrade into a single project with a single downtime – allowing us to minimize our testing effort. As part of your technical scoping exercise, investigate whether you need to upgrade your database or your operating system to the minimum level required by Release 12.1. If either of these technology components needs upgrading, decide whether to perform the upgrade before versus during your Release 12.1 downtime window. (See Chapter 1, “Planning for an Upgrade”, in the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Guide, Release 11i to 12.1.1 for information about Release 12.1 system requirements.) Tip #5 – Determine Your Project’s Functional Scope The standard upgrade moves you from 11i to Release 12.1 with the same setups and functionality, plus some additional, default functionality around tax, subledger accounting, ledgers and payments. You then have the option to implement additional new functionality either immediately, as part of the same project, or in a subsequent project. In general, consider whether to scope your Release 12.1 adoption as a single project that fully encompasses all the functional and business process changes you are targeting, or to divide your adoption into multiple projects. For example, you could simplify your Release 12.1 project by performing a minimal upgrade, versus Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 10
  • 11. upgrading and fully implementing new features to the target state. However, depending on your circumstances, you may want to scope your adoption to include all of the features that support your return on investment as a single project. Regardless of how you adopt Release 12.1, Regardless of how you adopt Release 12.1, it provides the foundation for over 300 it provides the foundation for over 300 new new features. These include the Oracle Financials accounting and tax engines and features across all of the product areas. the multi-organization capability that were introduced in Release 12, as well as many new Release 12.1 features in the other product areas. You can analyze the new features and implement them at your own pace at any time after your upgrade. Tip #6 – Plan for Required Financials Setup Steps Even a minimal upgrade requires some setup of the new Financials features that come by default, such as Trading Community Architecture (TCA) for supplier data, Payments and E-Business Tax. Some accounting entities (such as taxes, banks and suppliers) that were modeled by several Financials products in Release 11i were moved to a common implementation starting with Release 12. If you have setup inconsistencies among Release 11i products for setups that are centralized in Release 12.1, you should resolve them before you upgrade. For example, since supplier data moved from individual product tables in Release 11i to common TCA tables starting with Release 12, you should review your 11i supplier data and remove any duplicates prior to your 11i to Release 12.1 upgrade. Furthermore, the upgrade scripts that move Release 11i Financials setups to Release 12.1 are based on assumptions, detailed in the Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide, of what is appropriate for most business situations. If those assumptions would lead to an outcome that is inappropriate for your business situation, plan on modifying your Release 12.1 Financials setups. You can run the Accounting Setup Manager Pre-Update Diagnosis Report to view your Release 11i setup for Multiple Reporting Currencies, General Ledger, Global Accounting Engine, Assets, Payables, and Receivables. This report identifies setups that are potentially problematic. While you can upgrade successfully without running this report and without modifying your setup, you may find it more difficult to take advantage of new Release 12.1 functionality. (See Chapter 2, “Preparing for the Upgrade”, in the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Guide, Release 11i to 12.1.1 for more information about the Accounting Setup Manager Pre-Update Diagnosis report.) Tip #7 – Avoid Upgrading Obsolete Functionality By removing or disabling obsolete As part of your upgrade planning, work with your user community to identify any functionality while you are still running on setups, programs or seed data that you no longer use. By removing or disabling 11i, you can reduce the scope of your this obsolete functionality while you are still running on 11i, you can reduce the upgrade project. scope of your upgrade project. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 11
  • 12. For example, prior to Oracle’s own upgrade to Release 12.1, we reviewed and standardized our setups, and we eliminated obsolete reports, alerts, responsibilities, and other data to reduce our testing and upgrade effort. Tip #8 – Determine Your Data Migration Strategy For a new E-Business Suite implementation or a reimplementation, determine a data migration strategy for historical data. Your strategy should address the scope of data to migrate, for example, “migrate all open payables and receivables invoices.” If your intended migration scope is large, consider engaging an experienced migration consultant from Oracle Consulting or one of Oracle’s partners. The Oracle Integration Repository is a complete catalog of the many E-Business The Oracle Integration Repository is a Suite public interfaces that you can use to migrate historical data. It is part of the complete catalog of the many E-Business Suite public interfaces that you can use to Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, embedded in the applications migrate historical data. technology layer. You can access the Integration Repository by logging into your test installation of Release 12.1, choosing the Integrated SOA Gateway responsibility, and clicking the Integration Repository link. Figure 1: Integration Repository It’s important to determine whether your historical data needs cleansing to eliminate any data that is incorrect, out-of-date, redundant, incomplete, or incorrectly formatted. Typically, data that has undergone several prior upgrades or migrations can benefit from cleansing. By cleansing historical data, you can reduce data migration volume and prevent data inconsistencies in your Release 12.1 system. For audit purposes, establish a method for reconciling migrated data with legacy data. For example, you could compare the outputs obtained from Release 12.1 reports with the equivalent reports from your legacy system. In addition, you should validate through testing that you can successfully perform Release 12.1 operations on data migrated from your legacy system. Tip #9 – Assemble a Project Team that Combines Technical and Functional Skill Sets Consider including the following people on your Release 12.1 project team: Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 12
  • 13. A dedicated project manager • An executive steering committee – to provide project oversight and make critical decisions. • Business process owners – to analyze business process changes, and to participate in end-to-end testing and end user training. For Financials upgrades, consider including a tax specialist who knows the tax policies in the regions where you do business. • Application specialists – technical specialists with functional business knowledge who work closely with business process owners. Typically, application specialists focus on particular product areas and perform the related functional setups. • Technical team – one or more people who can function as a technical upgrade specialist, an operating system administrator, a database administrator, an applications server (middle tier) specialist, a performance specialist, a change management (patching) specialist, and a customization developer. • Testers – both technical and functional. You will also need someone to log and track service requests (SRs), and a DBA to apply patches. • A training lead – to assist in the Release 12.1 rollout to end users If you decide to retain outside consultants to provide expertise that is lacking from your in-house team, prefer consultants with prior Release 12.1 experience. With the large number of customers either implementing or live on Releases 12 and 12.1, there is a significant pool of skilled and trained consultants. Oracle Consulting, Oracle’s partners, and Oracle’s Advanced Customer Services team offer many Release 12.1 upgrade- and implementation-related services. Tip #10 – Involve Your Business Users at Every Project Phase Several Release 12 and 12.1 adopters have commented that strong support from business users has been critical to their project success, citing the power of a “we’re-all-in-this-together” attitude. Be sure to involve business users from the Be sure to involve business users from the start of your project so that they are start of your project so that they are prepared for Release 12.1 changes in look and process flow. Identify the functional prepared for Release 12.1 changes in look areas where users will see the biggest changes and concentrate your training efforts and process flow. there. For example, in Oracle Payables, the payments process uses a new Payments dashboard, and the Invoice workbench is significantly reworked. Plan to reinforce user learning even after your production cutover with internal documentation and job aids. Consider using Oracle’s process documentation and end user training tools, Oracle Tutor and Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK), to help with knowledge transfer to business users (see Tip #22.) Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 13
  • 14. Tip #11 – Keep Your Project Team in Place through Your First Financials Close After your Release 12.1 go-live, plan to keep your project team in place at least through your first Financials close, and ideally through your first quarterly close. Your project team can closely monitor the health of your production system, logging service requests as needed and notifying end users through broadcast e- mails of any significant issues. The project team can serve as a backup to the smaller in-house support team that normally handles end user queries. Tip #12 – Develop a Robust Testing Strategy We cannot over-emphasize the importance of testing to the success of your Release 12.1 upgrade project. As for any new release, you should formulate a testing strategy that details the number of test rounds, types of testing, and who will be involved, with an overall goal of performing end-to-end testing of all business flows and scenarios. In addition to conference room pilot testing to validate setups, ensure that you do full functional testing with business users. Perform multiple rounds of testing, focusing on new and changed functionality. The number of test rounds and your acceptance criteria should be carefully considered at the outset of your project, and then reconsidered before and after each test round. The timeframe for your testing rounds should be clearly stated. Issues and slow turnaround on resolutions may affect your testing period; make sure you budget enough time for issue resolution. Agree in advance which types of issues should be considered as show-stoppers to putting Release 12.1 into production, or even to advancing to the next test round. Your testing should be guided by detailed test scripts that you prepare in advance. You can start with the test scripts used in your original implementation, updating them to reflect new Release 12.1 functionality and process changes that you intend to implement. If you do not have test scripts from your original implementation, you can create test scripts by documenting what you currently do in the system. Be sure to specify expected test results to compare against your actual test results. Well before your planned go-live date, Well before your planned go-live date, begin performing test upgrades against a begin performing test upgrades against a copy (clone) of your existing system. Test upgrades help to establish that the copy (clone) of your existing system. upgrade will fit into your downtime window, and allow for tuning of upgrade scripts as needed. Also, be sure to track any upgrade impacts on your custom code. Oracle’s Testing Practices Oracle uses a standard testing flow for all systems changes. Changes are collected into release bundles that are promoted through a series of test environments, each of which runs a full-sized copy of our production database: • Build Test – where the technical team tests changes for several weeks before handing off to business users for testing Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 14
  • 15. User Acceptance Test – where business users and the technical team do several weeks of full end-to-end testing, including regression testing of key transaction flows. • Staging Test – where the technical team does final regression testing of key transaction flows and a full dry run of the transition outage about one week prior to production cutover. For the 11i to Release 12 upgrade, we followed our standard testing flow, but increased the number of test rounds. We also added a one-off Technical Test environment where our technical staff did simulations to identify any performance regressions, as well as iterative runs of the upgrade process to tune performance and minimize the duration. Just a week before go-live, we did a full dress rehearsal of the upgrade transition in the Staging Test environment, allowing us to get very accurate timings for our production go-live. Automated Testing Tools You can create your own functional and load test suites using Oracle Application You can create your own functional and Testing Suite, which is supported for use with Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 11i, load test suites using Oracle Application Testing Suite, which is supported for use 12, and 12.1. with Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 11i, The Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS) is composed of: 12, and 12.1. • Oracle Load Testing for scalability, performance, and load testing • Oracle Functional Testing for automated functional and regression testing • Oracle Test Manager for test process management, test execution, and defect tracking OATS uses Oracle E-Business Suite Accelerators to enable support for automated functional testing and load testing of both E-Business Suite Web- and Oracle Forms-based screens. Using the OATS graphical scripting interface, your business users can record automated test scripts by stepping through Oracle E-Business Suite business transactions, mimicking normal business operations. You can use the same interface to run scripts, parameterize script inputs, add custom test cases to validate content, and extend scripts programmatically in Java. Also using the same interface, you can create automated load test scripts that allow Oracle Load Testing to simulate thousands of concurrent virtual users. In an upgrade context, you could use the OATS tool to load test your Release 12.1 test system to ensure that it adequately scales to the volume of transactions you anticipate in production, including worst-case peak loads. You can read more about the OATS solution at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/etest.html Additionally, Oracle provides a “Test Starter Kit” for Release 12.1.1 that uses OATS. The Test Starter Kit includes sample test scripts and an instruction guide for using the OATS automated testing tool with Oracle E-Business Suite. The Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 15
  • 16. sample test scripts were created by Oracle’s Quality Assurance team and they run against an E-Business Suite Vision Demo database. You can use the sample test scripts as a model for building your own unique portfolio of regression test suites. You can download the Test Start Kit from the Oracle Application Testing Suite site linked from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/app- testing/index.html. Tip #13 – Plan to Test with Upgraded As Well as New Data and at Full Volumes Test all of your business scenarios with documents upgraded from Release 11i as well as those created in Release 12.1. Test performing operations in Release 12.1 on documents that were created in Release 11i. For example, test that an invoice created in Release 11i can have a credit memo issued against it in Release 12.1 with matching tax calculations. Or, create a payment in Release 11i, then void it in Release 12.1. This would validate that setup differences between Release 11i and 12.1 do not create inconsistencies in a business document as it completes its flow. In-progress workflow items should, in general, upgrade smoothly. However, validate this with testing, especially where you have customized Release 11i pre- seeded workflow processes or activities. You could consider reducing the number of in-progress workflow items by turning off applications such as iExpenses and iProcurement for some interval prior to your upgrade, and encouraging your managers to respond to pending workflow notifications. While your initial conference room pilot testing may validate setups based on sample or demonstration data, it’s critical that you do full, end-to-end testing on the complete data set that you intend to run in production. Release 12.1 data validation is even tighter than in prior releases, so you need to find whether there are any data conditions that would fail Release 12.1 validation. Oracle recommends that you test your In particular, Oracle recommends that during user acceptance testing, you test your month-end and quarter-end close and month-end and quarter-end close and reconciliation with full data volumes, and reconciliation with full data volumes, and that you resolve any exceptions. Additionally, once you go live, consider simulating that you resolve any exceptions. a month-end close a few days before your first actual month-end close. Tip #14 – Plan to Do Load and Volume Testing Because new reports and business processes may be sensitive to your data distribution, and to ensure that your system has the expected performance characteristics, make sure you do load and volume testing. Oracle’s Load and Volume Testing Oracle’s Applications IT team has learned from experience that doing adequate performance testing of any system change is critical. Even for regularly scheduled small-to-medium changes, Oracle does automated load and volume testing, simulating heavy system usage. For a project as major as an E-Business Suite upgrade, we do even more load and stress testing. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 16
  • 17. For our Release 12 upgrade, Oracle did “batch load tests,” replaying concurrent requests pulled from production against a test copy of an upgraded database. This allowed our technical staff to study the behavior of reports running with different parameter settings and to detect any performance regressions. In addition, Oracle has found that there is no substitute for letting end users loose on a test environment to introduce a diverse and unexpected mix of transactions and batch load. That’s why, in addition to doing scripted regression testing, Oracle did a six-hour “User Participation Test” on a Release 12 environment configured with full production processing capacity. While IT and business users bombarded the system with transactions and batch processes, Oracle’s DBAs studied the system, looking for stress points and unexpected behaviors. Even with all of this pre- go-live testing, Oracle took the precautionary step of defining special concurrent manager queues into which we could move any jobs that demonstrated performance issues after go-live. By isolating these jobs in special queues, we could control the resources they consumed and ensure that they did not have a detrimental impact on our business. Additional Performance Advice Oracle’s Applications Performance team recommends that Release 12.1 upgrade customers who are already live on Release 11g of the database, or those who are combining their applications upgrade with an 11g database upgrade follow the advice in the “Upgrade to 11g Performance Best Practices” white paper at My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 1100303.1. This paper offers advice on optimizing the 11g database upgrade process, highlighting 11g features that you can use to performance-test the Release 12.1 database workload, as well as avoid potential performance issues. Tip #15 – Engage with Oracle Support Ensure that you have ready access to the Ensure that you have ready access to the My Oracle Support portal at My Oracle Support portal, and that you https://support.oracle.com, and that you understand and leverage the information, understand and leverage the information, tools, and services that are available to you there. In particular, Oracle tools, and services that are available to recommends that you download and install the Oracle Configuration Manager you there. (OCM), a support tool that allows Oracle to more proactively assist you with your upgrade, as well as with ongoing operations once your upgrade is complete. Using Oracle Configuration Manager, you can upload the configuration of your Oracle computing environment. You can associate your configuration with information about your upgrade project that you upload via My Oracle Support. Having knowledge of both your configuration and your project allows Oracle’s support engineers to proactively suggest solutions and resolve issues, while being sensitive to critical events in your business that could affect your upgrade. The Oracle Configuration Manager includes a data collector that is designed to track key Oracle and system parameters for each host on which it runs. The collected data is sent via secure HTTPS to My Oracle Support, where we maintain a Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 17
  • 18. secure and updated view of each host’s configuration. Oracle collects only configuration information, such as installed patches; deployment dates, versions, and type; deployed components and applications; configuration files; and network configurations. Using the collected information, My Oracle Support provides security and product alerts, patch advice, and system health checks that are specific to your computing environment. To learn more about the Oracle Configuration Manager and the automated services it provides, click the “Collector” link under the “More” tab on the My Oracle Support portal. To view the full catalog of system health checks available via the Oracle Configuration Manager, see the “My Oracle Support Health Checks Catalog” at My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 868955.1. Figure 2: Oracle Configuration Manager: Collector You may also wish to take advantage of the highly personalized services available from Oracle’s Solution Support Center, part of Oracle’s Advanced Customer Services team. For example, one of our enterprise customers described engaging with Oracle’s Solution Support Center at the start of their Release 12.1 upgrade project. The Solution Support Center performed a “Customer Success Assessment”, and based on that recommended a catalog of services, including customized training and knowledge transfer. In addition, the Solution Support Center joined with the customer’s hardware vendor to evaluate the customer’s topology, hardware, and software – which resulted in a change to the customer’s planned CPU and memory configuration. In this case, the customer found it beneficial to engage an on-site “Solution Support Center Engineer” who worked alongside of the in-house project team. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 18
  • 19. Tip #16 – Develop an Issue Resolution Strategy Develop an issue resolution strategy that spells out how you will address issues that arise during testing. In particular, Oracle recommends that you define an incident resolution flow for handling issues internally before you log them as service requests. Most customers find it helpful to maintain a prioritized issues list, tracking the details of all open and resolved issues encountered during their upgrade project. Be sure to designate who will troubleshoot and characterize issues, and who will log and track Service Requests (SRs). If you are using the Oracle Configuration Manager, you can automatically associate a configuration with your Service Request and save the effort of manually entering configuration data. We also recommend that you install tools such as Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, or Oracle Applications Manager. These tools can proactively monitor your Oracle E-Business Suite test and production systems, sending informational alerts to warn your system administrators of any incidents. You can also set up these tools to take corrective action on common issues and reduce the impact of any incidents. For more details on the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 982302.1, “Getting Started with Oracle Application Management Pack and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite”. For more on the Oracle Applications Manager, see the Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide Documentation Set. Additionally, set up the Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics framework and understand how to use it so that you can transmit diagnostic reports to Oracle Support (see Tip #17 for more information.) To learn more about working with Oracle Support to resolve issues, see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 166650.1, “Working Effectively with Global Customer Support.” Also see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 199389.1 for advice on “Escalating Service Requests with Oracle Support Services”. Tip #17 – Take Advantage of Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics consist of a toolset and tests to help you collect and analyze information about E-Business Suite setup and processing issues. You can use these diagnostics after each test upgrade to identify and troubleshoot any issues. Once you are satisfied with the outcome of your test upgrades, it’s a good idea to save your diagnostic output so that you can compare it with the diagnostic output that you get just after your production upgrade. You can also use the diagnostics after you go live to help troubleshoot any issues that may arise. Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics are easy to use, designed for both functional and technical users. The diagnostic tests do not alter your setup or transactional data in any way. They enable you to avoid issues, resolve issues on your own, or Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 19
  • 20. obtain diagnostic output that you can upload with a Service Request to speed Oracle’s resolution of your issue. Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics are automatically installed with Release 12.1, and the latest versions of the toolset and tests are available through a standard patch. See My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 342459.1 for more information. Tip #18 – Inventory Your Customizations and Prioritize Them for Upgrade Inventory your customizations and Inventory your customizations and determine which functions could be replaced by determine which functions could be standard product in Release 12.1. A major 11i customer with several thousand replaced by standard product in Release customizations observed that at least half of those were already built into Release 12.1. 12.1, eliminating the need for forward-porting. Be sure to consider the many user interface (UI) improvements in Release 12.1 as you evaluate customizations for retirement. In particular, notice the reduction in pop-ups and duplicate screens, the redesigned and streamlined workflows, the reduced number of steps to complete key tasks, and the improved overall look and feel. Also consider how you can leverage Release 12.1’s increased personalization capabilities. To learn more about these 12.1 UI and personalization enhancements, see the Release Content Document for Application Technology (linked from My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 561580.1.) For international deployments, review country localization features, new starting with Release 12, that may simplify or replace your customizations (See My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 429042.1.) Validate with your business users which For any customizations that remain, validate with your business users which customizations are most critical to them so customizations are most critical to them so that you can prioritize your upgrade that you can prioritize your upgrade effort. effort. It may be possible to defer the implementation of some customizations until after the initial upgrade project. You may wish to consider engaging Oracle Consulting or an Oracle partner to execute a detailed CEMLI (Customization, Extension, Modification, Localization, and Integration) framework review. This should be done to assist in properly planning your upgrade program. Assessing the Impact of Database Changes to Your Custom Code You should review the impact of changes to database objects on your custom code. In particular, note that starting with Release 12, the backward-compatible views RA_CUSTOMERS and RA_ADDRESSES are no longer available, so you should change any custom code that references them to reference the relevant Trading Community Architecture (TCA) tables instead. Oracle documents database changes for each major release. Database changes from 11i.10 to 12 are highlighted in product-specific “Technical Overviews” that are part of the “Release 12 Transfer of Information Online Training” (see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 988725.1.) Database changes from Release Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 20
  • 21. 12 to 12.1 are listed in product-specific Release Notes that are linked from “Oracle Applications Documentation Resources, Release 12.1” (see My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 790942.1.) The Electronic Technical Reference Another resource that can help you understand database changes is the Electronic Manual (eTRM) documents the full data Technical Reference Manual (eTRM), which documents the full data model for model for Release 12.1, as well as the data Release 12.1, as well as the data models for prior releases. You can access the models for prior releases. eTRM at https://etrm.oracle.com, or from My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 150230.1. Adapting Your Custom Code to Architecture and Technology Changes Custom code developed using standard Release 11i development technologies (such as Oracle Forms, Oracle Application Framework, and Oracle Workflow) and built according to Oracle’s customization standards is, in general, compatible with the Release 12.1 technology stack. In particular, you should be able to run your custom forms on Release 12.1 after regenerating them using the latest certified version of the Oracle Forms Migration Assistant. For more information on the Forms Migration Assistant and Oracle’s customization standards, see the Oracle E- Business Suite Developer’s Guide, Release 12.1. Note that starting with Release 12, Oracle E-Business Suite migrated to new technologies from these now-deprecated technologies: • mod_plsql • Oracle Reports Server Reports • Oracle Graphics integrations with Oracle Forms • AK mode of Oracle Application Framework If you did custom development using any of these deprecated technologies, consider whether to migrate to newer technologies while you are still running your current E-Business Suite release, or to defer migration until your Release 12.1 upgrade downtime. See “Preparing Custom Development for the Next Oracle Applications E-Business Suite Release” (My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 374398.1) for a discussion of migration alternatives for the deprecated technologies. In addition, Release 12 introduced support for Multiple Organizations Access Control (MOAC), which enables access to data in multiple organizations from a single responsibility. See My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 420787.1 to learn how to MOAC-enable your custom forms, Oracle Application Framework pages, concurrent programs, and reports. Planning for Re-implemented Customizations Of your remaining customizations, identify those that you can move with minimal investment versus those that you need to re-implement. For example, you must re- implement customizations that were developed using now-deprecated technologies. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 21
  • 22. You may also need to re-factor or refine customizations that are partially replaced by Release 12.1 functionality or that are affected by significant data model changes. For any customizations that you decide to re-implement, carefully consider your approach. Wherever possible, use E-Business Suite personalization functionality – which includes flexfields, folders, and the OA Personalization Framework – to tailor the applications to your needs. Customizing with OA Personalization Framework Using the OA Personalization Framework, you can declaratively modify the user Using the OA Personalization Framework, interface of OA Framework pages to produce immediate, visual feedback of you can declaratively modify the user interface of OA Framework pages to changes. For example, you can: produce immediate, visual feedback of • hide or show page items or regions changes. • add new items • change prompts, titles and text • re-order items or regions • make items required With OA Personalization Framework, there is no impact to the base page definition, and no need for a separate development tool. Additionally, any changes that you make are upgrade-safe – patching the base page does not affect existing user interface personalizations. However, using OA Personalization Framework, you cannot build new pages or modify existing business logic such as data validations, and you have limited ability to change existing page flows. If you must extend the E-Business Suite applications, use either the standard E-Business Suite development tools or the latest Fusion Middleware development tools. Extending with Oracle’s E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware Development Tools For extensions that are incremental to existing business flows, where users expect For extensions that are incremental to the standard E-Business Suite user experience, consider using the standard E- existing business flows, where users expect the standard E-Business Suite user Business Suite development technologies. These include Oracle Application experience, consider using the standard E- Framework (using the OA Extension to JDeveloper 10g), Oracle Forms, Oracle BI Business Suite development technologies. Publisher, and Oracle Workflow. With these tools, you can leverage the same coding standards and user interface components that we use internally at Oracle to create extensions that are tightly integrated with the E-Business Suite. There are also some features, such as flexfields, that are only available on the standard E- Business Suite technology stack. For self-contained extensions, targeted to users who do not require the standard E- For self-contained extensions, targeted to Business Suite user experience, consider using the latest Fusion Middleware users who do not require the standard E- Business Suite user experience, consider technologies. These include the Application Development Framework (ADF), using the latest Fusion Middleware Oracle WebCenter, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise technologies. Edition (OBIEE). With these tools, you can extend the value of your current Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 22
  • 23. applications while gaining valuable IT and operational skills that you will need to prepare for Oracle’s next-generation, Fusion Middleware-based applications. For example, you can: • Create a composite application spanning E-Business Suite and one or more other applications (packaged or custom.) • Create an advanced user interface leveraging the AJAX UI capabilities of ADF. • Develop a self-service extension to E-Business Suite for “casual” or “infrequent” users of the system who are unconcerned about UI consistency. For example, using ADF you could create a simplified, efficient user interface, launched from the EBS home page, which allows users to submit requisitions but not access the entire E-Business Suite. (For additional examples of ADF self-service extensions, see “The Evolutionary Path: Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications” at http://www.oracle.com/applications/evolutionary-path-to-fusion.pdf) Releases 12.1.2 and 12.1.3 provide additional functionality that allows you to flexibly combine E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware development technologies. For example, you can embed rich content – such as OBIEE analytics or an ADF task flow – into an OAF page to produce an advanced UI. For more on this topic, see the Release Content Document for Application Technology, linked from My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 561580.1. For more on Oracle Fusion Middleware and the many benefits it provides to the E- Business Suite, see the following white papers: • “Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware”, http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/applications/ebs/whyfmwisb estmiddlewareforebs.pdf • “Application Upgrades and SOA”, http://www.oracle.com/technologies/soa/docs/soa-application- upgrades.pdf Tip #19 – Consider Migrating Your Reports to Business Intelligence Publisher Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle BI Publisher), formerly known as XML Publisher, is an enterprise reporting solution for authoring, managing and delivering all types of highly-formatted documents. End users can easily design report layouts (“templates”) using familiar desktop tools, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Adobe Acrobat. BI Publisher can query or accept data from practically any data source – databases, packaged applications, web services, HTTP feeds, or file data sources. At runtime, BI Publisher merges template files with XML data to produce a wide variety of formatted outputs, including: Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 23
  • 24. Customer-ready PDF documents, such as financial statements, marketing materials, contracts, invoices, and purchase orders using colors, images, font styles, headers, footers, and other formatting and design options. • HTML output for optimum online viewing. • Excel output to create a spreadsheet of your report data. • "Filled-out" third-party provided PDF documents. For example, you can use a government form in PDF as a template. At runtime, your data and template merge to produce a "filled-out" form. • Flat text files to exchange with business partners for EDI and EFT transmission. BI Publisher was used in Release 11i.10 for high-fidelity formatting of many external documents. With Release 12, many more standard reports used BI Publisher, and with Release 12.1 nearly all reports use it. For BI Publisher-based reports, an XML data extract is provided along with a default layout (template) that you can easily modify. We recommend that you convert any custom reports based on mod_plsql to BI We recommend that you convert any Publisher. Consider converting your custom Oracle Reports reports to BI custom reports based on mod_plsql to BI Publisher. Consider converting your Publisher, as well. If you move your custom reports to BI Publisher before custom Oracle Reports reports to BI upgrading to Release 12.1, you may need to adjust the queries you use to produce Publisher as well. the report output, but your formatting will remain valid for Release 12.1. Oracle provides a migration utility to facilitate the conversion of Oracle Reports to BI Publisher reports. The conversion process takes an Oracle Reports RDF file, which embeds both data extraction logic and report layout, and converts it to the separate data extract and layout objects necessary for a BI Publisher report. To learn more about the migration process, see Appendix D, “Oracle Report to XML Publisher Report Migration” in the Oracle XML Publisher Administration and Developer’s Guide, Release 12. Tip #20 – Review Your Integrations and Consider Modernizing Them As you inventory your custom code, also inventory your integrations and make a Consider whether certain integrations plan to re-test and re-tune them. Consider whether certain integrations would be would be easier to maintain and upgrade if they were modernized using tools from the easier to maintain and upgrade if they were modernized using tools from the Fusion Middleware Suite. Fusion Middleware Suite. For example, look for “brittle” integrations or needless data replications, including: • Integrations implemented using database synchronization (for example, DBLink), which depend upon a particular database schema and circumvent the application’s own validation logic. • Integrations implemented “point to point”, where data is transformed as it moves between different data schemas used by different applications that may be evolving independently from one another. Today’s best practice is to leverage a canonical, application-independent data model that can act as a Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 24
  • 25. hub for all integrations. Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is Oracle's product offering that implements a best practice canonical service model. • Complex integrations implemented using programmatic, hard-to-debug procedures, such as those based on PLSQL, versus integrations implemented declaratively, for example using a visual BPEL process flow. • Integrations completed as batches, which are less resilient to exception and error handling. Decide if you should take the opportunity of the Release 12.1 upgrade or a companion project to re-implement any problem integrations. Oracle Fusion Middleware components, such as Oracle SOA Suite, can help you leverage the real- time integration capabilities made possible through the service-enablement of the E-Business Suite achieved through the Integrated SOA Gateway. In addition, Oracle Data Integrator can be leveraged for batch-style data integrations. We also suggest that you use Oracle B2B instead of Oracle EDI Gateway or Oracle XML Gateway to develop any new B2B integrations. Tip #21 – Reexamine User Roles and Responsibilities and Business Processes You should reexamine user roles and You should reexamine user roles and responsibilities due to business process responsibilities due to business process changes introduced starting with Release 12. For example, who should be changes introduced starting with Release responsible for any issues related to the new tax and subledger engines? Who will 12. read and interpret the related exception reports? You should also consider whether users have access to data and functions that are incompatible with each other from a segregation of duties (SOD) perspective. Starting with Release 12, the Oracle Applications Access Controls Governor provides the ability to analyze the entire access model, from “roles” and “responsibilities” down to the “functions” (secured operations) in the Oracle E- Business Suite. In addition, with Enterprise Transaction Controls Governor, you can evaluate all business transactions to see if any SOD violations have, in fact, occurred. With Oracle Applications Access Controls Governor, you can designate any combination of incompatible access points (roles, responsibilities, menus, or functions.) The application can then report occurrences of users with incompatible access points so that managers can modify the privileges and tasks assigned to them. Included with Applications Access Controls Governor is the ability to ask “what if?” or to simulate changes to the authorization model (menus, sub-menus, responsibilities, and so on), and to include approval steps before assigning access rights that represent an SOD risk. Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12.1 Page 25