God save Customers!
God save Customers! I am currently on a vacation and today morning got an emergency mail from my organization. I thought I’ll share it with all the PeopleSoft experts and ask them their advice on this. The current project we are on is a 7.5 to 8.9 HRMS upgrade, the Customer wants us to perform a re-implementation of HRMS 8.9 and then migrate and convert the data from their 7.5 system to the newly implemented 8.9 system. The reason being stated is that a 7.5 to 8.9 upgrade will take two hops to reach 8.9 and the customer is worried about the RISK involved in the two hops (calls it cumulative risk!). The customer wants us to implement HRMS 8.9 and then migrate and convert the data from 7.5 to 8.9. Now the biggest dilemma that I face is, I think a vendor (I mean a service provider!) conversion from 7.5 to 8.9 will have more risk involved in it than the delivered conversion from 7.5 to 8.9. The customer calls it less riskier because he says we can test the application after we convert our data to 8.9, rather than hop from 7.5 to 8.8 and then from 8.8 to 8.9 and finally test the errors and figure out the exact place where our conversion got screwed (Could be between 7.5 to 8.8 or 8.8 to 8.9). My God! I think he is missing another vital piece of it, migrating and converting all the data is going to take at least twice the time compared to what two data conversions from 7.5 to 8.9. This in turn results in double the down-time. The amount of effort required in writing the conversion scripts is going to be huge. Implementation time required for applying the required customizations to the system can be reduced to a certain extent, but it still is going to be higher. The effort required in making the setup is going to be high. I do not see any benefit to this approach.
I’m looking forward to your valuable suggestions. I’ll post more once I’m back from my vacation on Monday, hopefully. You can mail me at nextrevolutioninerp@yahoo.com
2 comments:
I think its not all that bad an idea. It depends on the level of customization on their database. If thats a big percentage, then you would have to customize the delivered conversion programs twice.
Remeber State of California? They did that with their financials upgarde. In fact they made that decision half way into an upgrade.
Sanjay,
Customizations in State of California were atleast 80% more than what my current customer has! After our copies we have a New 8.9 system with Custom Added objects (Custom Added objects can also be removed to suit our requirements). We can make all the required changes to our system after our copies and making the conversion run from within our database with customized data conversion scripts should prove to be more efficient. Post Copies is the right place to make all the changes that we need based on our findings is what I think. Setup changes that must be made to the system can be made after copies by flushing only our obsolete setups and making the latest setups according to our requirements. I still think that an upgrade must be used to leverage all the benefits of our initial investment.
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