Fortune 500 Construction Company Upgrades Oracle JD Edwards

The Client

A Fortune 500 construction and engineering company with operations spanning multiple countries. They lead the way in integrated infrastructure solutions for the electric power, oil & gas and telecommunication industries.

The Problem

Under the rapidly increasing pace of digital transformation, companies must be on officially supported and code current system platforms to stay competitive and continue growth. Without official support and the ability to take advantage of new capabilities, company growth and business processes can be severely hampered; this is a risk companies cannot afford to take.

The client has relied on Oracle JD Edwards (JDE) for many critical business functions over the past 5+ years. These include HR, Payroll, Finance, Procurement and Equipment to name a few. During this period of time, they have fallen behind Oracle’s latest commercial supported release (9.2) while being on 9.0.

Today, the client and a growing number of its operating companies rely on JDE for their business processes. Remaining on 9.0 meant the potential of increased maintenance costs as well as added risks.

More importantly, this upgrade was required to continue to receive Oracle support for regulatory updates. The upgrade was a critical project and needed to be delivered on-time within the required go-live window of Q3 2018.

The Solution

Smartbridge planned comprehensive JDE upgrade methodology tailored to meet the specific requirements of the project. Smartbridge’s project team members had an average of 15+ years of JDE experience to enable energy and construction/engineering companies in the areas of HR, Payroll, Inventory, Finance, Fixed Assets, Equipment Maintenance and many more processes.

Since 2012, Smartbridge has been successfully supporting this client in areas of JDE and IT project delivery services. The strong history of partnership continues today as one of their strategic technology partners.

During the course of this multi-year relationship, Smartbridge has helped the construction firm successfully achieve many application modernization milestones:

The JDE upgrade was very complex, spanning over 8 major operating companies and 1000+ users. As a core component of the construction firm’s application architecture, the JDE system had integrations to third-party systems, including Vertex, Transform AP, banking systems, SharePoint, Hyperion, Boomi, Talend, and other vendors. Smartbridge’s familiarity with these technologies and integrations was a key success factor in enabling a smooth upgrade.

The Results

Smarbridge delivered the JDE upgrade successfully on-time and under-budget, meeting all of requirements and additionally completing the following results as part of the upgrade:

Smartbridge successfully delivered the modernization of the client’s critical JDE system, and continues to work to modernize other parts of its overall application and integration architecture.

APPLICATION MODERNIZATION

In order to be ready to support the demands of digital transformation initiatives that fuel business growth in today’s competitive landscape, it is critical to upgrade and/or migrate legacy applications to present-day platforms.

Bringing existing software up-to-date on support will allow for the introduction of new functionality provided in the latest release, but there are additional modernization options as well: re-platforming, re-architecting, reintegrating, replacing or retiring, or migrating to the cloud.

We can help you determine the best path forward for your systems modernization.