Background
In April of 2021 one of the largest providers of technology services and hardware for the United States government embarked on a mission to modernize their Supply Chain Planning solution. The goal of this modernization effort was to reduce costs, gain efficiencies, and drive innovation so that the company could better serve its governmental, defense, and intelligence clients. To make this implementation possible, Procurement, Inventory, and Order Management data would first need to be migrated from their legacy IFS system to Oracle Cloud. One priority of the migration project was to enrich data as it was extracted from IFS so that it could drive enhanced business capabilities and intelligence in Oracle Cloud.
Connecting Different Sources
One challenge that was identified early in the process was that while the Supply Chain Planning was moving to Oracle Cloud, the accounts payable and other financial data remained in a separate Oracle EBS ERP system. There were several impacts of this system design on the data conversion process.
During the migration process Premier needed to make sure that any purchase order that still had an open accounts payable amount would be migrated into Oracle Cloud. Using the Applaud tool, Premier was able to connect to Oracle EBS directly and confirm that all purchase orders with the open AP amount were converted.
On top of this, the Supplier data needed to exist in both ERP systems after the Oracle Cloud system went live. To ensure that the data stayed in sync between the two sources Premier leveraged their deduplication process to merge Suppliers that had already been merged in Oracle EBS during a prior migration. Premier also provided a detailed mapping showing how Supplier data had been mapped between IFS, Oracle Cloud and Oracle EBS.
Validating Manual Data Collection
During the project design it was identified that a significant, several month effort would need to be undertaken to collect additional data that was not present in the legacy system, but was needed for business operations in Oracle Cloud. The project team would need to reach out to hundreds of individuals across dozens of teams asking for additional data points.
Premier was able to mitigate the risk that comes with data collection by building out a complex migration solution to apply these user-provided values to the correct Oracle Cloud attributes. Further, Premier leveraged our thorough data pre-validation process to ensure that the attributes that were required for each purchase order record were provided and that it fell within the list of values that were available for use. Premier went as far as validating the values provided for custom Oracle Cloud DFFs to ensure that they would be accepted by the system requirements.
Creating Note Attachments
In Oracle Cloud, it was determined that there wasn’t going to be enough space on each purchase order to capture the note data that needed to be preserved from the legacy system. The solution was to attach the legacy note details to each purchase order record as a downloadable Excel file. The challenge is that those Excel files didn’t exist prior to the conversion.
Premier was able to rectify this by building out a complex process to scan the legacy database for note details and build out the Excel attachment files. From there Premier leveraged their SDO Attachment utility to link each Excel file to the correct purchase order record. In total, nearly 25,000 attachment files were uploaded to Oracle Cloud and attached to the purchase orders at 100% success rate.
Set Up for Success
In the end the client was able to load 100% of the converted data objects and ensure that their Supply Chain Planning solution was set up for success for the years to come. While there were plenty of challenges along the way, the team was able to accomplish the original goal in just about one year. The legacy data had also been standardized and enriched in a way to allow for more efficient operations and more reporting capabilities in the future.
