Project Summary

After years of expanding and diversifying their portfolio of products and services, one of North America’s largest manufacturers of consumer packaged goods initiated a plan to convert its various acquisitions into a single instance of JDE EnterpriseOne (E1).

Project leadership established an aggressive plan to go live with JDE E1 one year from the project start date. But after 5 months of struggling with data conversion processes developed by their internal IT department, there were serious doubts about go-live readiness. Faced with hundreds of open data issues and no systematic way to solve them, the Systems Integrator (SI) partner called in Premier International to rescue the project.

This case study represents the conversion of manufacturing data from SAP ECC 6.0 to JDE E1 for all North American sites.

Requirements

The overall data migration requirements for the initial phase of the Global Manufacturing Acquisition project included:

  • The SAP and supplemental data needed to be extracted, consolidated, harmonized, cleansed, and transformed before it could be loaded into a single instance of JDE E1.
  • Major data cleanup and complicated selection criteria was being performed manually by the client. Spreadsheets associated with these efforts needed to be incorporated into the automated conversion process.
  • To guarantee that in-scope data was correctly divested from the parent SAP system, selection criteria needed to be validated against the results of queries provided by internal auditors. After the migration, the legacy data had to be fully reconciled against what was loaded into JDE E1.
  • Reports needed to be built to assist the business in identifying and applying changes to both SAP and JDE E1 during an extended dual maintenance window.
“Thanks so much for the efforts and the sacrifice. You guys rock.”
– CFO and EVP

Challenges

There were many challenges to making the Data Migration successful.  Some of the largest challenges faced and overcome were:

  • SAP source data structures were vastly different from the target JDE E1 data structures. Numerous supplemental cross-references and supporting data extracts were needed.
  • Since one of the recent acquisitions was not yet off their former parent company’s system, the conversions needed to execute complex selection logic and had to be built and tested without direct access to the legacy system.
  • The data conversion had been previously attempted through the use of SQL scripts, so these scripts became the basis of the selection criteria and requirements for the Applaud-based conversion routines.
  • Project leadership had little confidence in the existing conversion solution. The internal team’s initial attempt for conversion development relied on SQL scripts, included almost no error reporting, and proved to be unsustainable as requirements evolved and changes were needed.
  • The client organization intentionally shielded their end users from conversion requirement gathering and test cycles. This caused numerous gaps between the conversion results and the users’ expectations.
  • The conversion schedule was extremely tight. Test runs were scheduled every two weeks, which did not allow for thorough and complete testing, nor for the testers to request changes based on analyzed test results.
  • Numerous last-minute requirements forced changes to be made to transactional conversions during the final week before go-live, leaving virtually no time for business users to validate changes.

Applaud® for Data Migration

Key Activities

  • The team began by using Applaud’s integrated analytics and reporting tools to perform a deep analysis on the legacy data and proactively identify legacy data issues.
  • Data ran through Applaud standardization, consolidation, correction, and enrichment processes both before and as problem areas were identified, improving the overall quality of the data prior to go-live.
  • Instead of basic “lift and shift” SQL queries, 51 fully integrated transformation and migration processes were created and executed within Applaud.
  • The project timeline was maintained as additional requirement changes were identified and incorporated using Applaud’s rapid development capabilities.
  • The team replicated in-scope portions of the data landscape in a centralized data repository. Combining previously disparate data sources made data harmonization and validation efforts more efficient.
  • Robust and thorough error reporting was handled via the built-in cleansing tools; this allowed the team to proactively identify and rectify failures before loading data to the target JDE E1 tables.
  • Developed extensive financial validation reports, and reconciled business SQL queries to the converted data out of Applaud.
  • The error and validation reports served as platforms for comparing the target JDE E1 production data with the source SAP production data, which became especially helpful during the dual maintenance activities.
  • Premier’s RapidTrak methodology was used to manage the various conversion interdependencies, decreasing the overall data migration effort and reducing project risk.

The Bottom Line

The Results

51 Conversion Objects
7 Months

Applaud’s integrated platform immediately provided insights into the data landscape, drove creation of reports and KPI’s, enabled rapid development of complex conversion programs, and ultimately made it possible to load, validate, and reconcile data for 51 different conversions.

Even though Premier consultants entered the project mid-flight, they were able to pick up complex yet untested SQL conversion where internal resources left off, without sacrificing progress already made. This allowed for a more holistic data migration approach that included legacy data cleansing and post conversion reconciliation.

By taking over conversion responsibility, Premier enabled a previously overwhelmed internal team to focus on deliverables that will have lasting impact, like reporting, integrations, and training. 7 months after Premier began work, the entire team celebrated a successful JDE EnterpriseOne go-live for all North American sites, on time and on budget.

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The Applaud® Advantage

To help overcome the expected data migration challenges,the organization engaged Premier International’s Applaud® data migration services to eliminate the risk from their data migration and ensure the overall success of their consolidation project.

Three key components of Premier International’s Applaud solution helped the client navigate their data migration:

  1. Premier’s data migration consultants: Premier’s services group averages more than six years of experience working with Applaud, exclusively on data migration projects.
  2. Premier’s methodology: Premier’s EPACTL approach to data migration projects is different than traditional ETL approaches and helps ensure the project stays on track. This methodology decreases overall implementation time and reduces the risk of the migration.
  3. Premier’s data migration software, Applaud: Applaud has been optimized to address the challenges that occur on data migration projects, allowing the team to accomplish all data needs using one integrated product.

All three aspects of the solution were critical factors in meeting the tight time frames required to rescue this project.