The Customer is a top 50 Federal Government Contractor. The company offers custom kits and mission-ready solutions that fit the unique needs of the Department of Defense, field medics, aircraft maintenance crews, state and local law enforcement and firefighting agencies, and search and rescue dive teams.
The customer needed to upgrade their Oracle E-Business Suite environments to be compliant with the latest version (12.2.13), operating system OEL8, and security (CPU) patches. The EBS environment included Financials, Supply Chain, Order Management, Manufacturing, and WMS/MWA hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a government contractor, one of the requirements for this project was to have a US-based team allocated. The goal was to effectively upgrade with minimal disruption to the business. As their current, trusted Managed Services provider for over six years, Apps Associates was selected as the partner for this project based on the quality of our deliverables and proven expertise in executing mission-critical, complex cloud-based upgrades.
The project approach included multiple iterations of upgrading and testing the EBS environments. The database servers were upgraded to new servers with the latest Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL8), and the Customer’s Blitz reporting was upgraded to resolve an issue in the production environment.
The database operating system upgrade and EBS Application upgrade were separated into two cutover windows. Multiple dry runs of the EBS Application upgrade were executed and tested to account for an Oracle patch bug and to minimize the downtime outage.
Due to the hard work and extensive testing by the Apps Managed Services and project teams, the EBS Application upgrade went smoothly and was completed significantly ahead of schedule with minimal post go-live issues. Apps Associates seamlessly transitioned from project mode to supporting production operations via our world-class Managed Services platform without any deviations.
The Customer has One Production and Two Non-Production environments
Environment Details (after upgrade):
The Customer aimed to modernize their E-Business suite application by upgrading to the latest supported version. The previous EBS version 12.2.6 was no longer supported, as Oracle announced their minimum code level support to be version 12.2.7. This put the Customer at risk in running their mission critical ERP application on an un-supported version. If any new issues were to arise, it would not be supported by Oracle. The Customer also wanted to explore the new features, functionality, and reports available in the latest version, which would help their business to run in a more efficient manner. The database server was running OEL7, for which support is no longer available.
The Customer wanted to upgrade the OS to OEL8 to be current with a supported OS version and to leverage the latest security updates. The Customer also needed to update their Blitz report to the latest version. The current AWS Cloud platform was more than poised to deliver the necessary performance and scalability to support the organization’s future growth.
Apps Associates worked closely with the Customer team on the planning for upgrading both PROD and two Non-PROD environments. This project involved two phases. The first phase was to upgrade the OS of the database server. A new OEL8 server was spun up and all the pre-requisites were applied to it. Then the database was moved from the old OEL7 server to the new OEL8 server by detaching and attaching the EBS volumes. Later, we configured the application to point to the new database server. The flexible nature of AWS EBS volumes was key to the speed, efficiency, and integrity of the OS upgrades.
The second phase was to upgrade the ERP system to the latest 12.2 version. First the latest AD, TXK and CPU patches were applied to the system as a preparation step. After the cutover, 12.2.13 patch was applied. Post ERP system upgrade, the Blitz report was also upgraded to the latest version.
Testing (Unit, Integration and User Acceptance Testing) was performed by the Customer IT/End User team, as part of the Iterations and all business functionalities were tested and validated successfully.
The production go-live was split into two dates, one for the database OS upgrade and another for E-Business application upgrade.
During the upgrade, some major issues arose. The 12.2.13 upgrade failed due to the interference of custom materialized views. After continuous debugging and working with Oracle support, that issue was mitigated. After the initial upgrade, there were duplicate concurrent managers. This was a critical halt in the upgrade project, and the cause was unpredictable. The Apps Associates team worked in sync with Oracle support and identified that an edition-based policy and a function were missing. After creating the missing policy and function, the upgrade was successful. The Apps Associates team worked in multiple iterations, which were not planned initially, to ensure that the upgrade would give predictable output every time and provide a consistent run time.
A few more issues surfaced after go-live. The Lock Box application did not work as expected and the CRM form was crashing. Both the issues were addressed in a timely manner.
Apps Associates is a premier enterprise applications and technology advisor, counseling and executing across every stage of the enterprise transformation journey—not just the destination. For more than two decades, Apps Associates has closely collaborated with decision makers across nearly every industry, offering end-to-end integration, modernization, and cloud migration services. By helping to break down the silos within today’s most complex business challenges, Apps Associates is unlocking solutions and efficiencies that scale into future opportunities. Learn more at appsassociates.com or follow on LinkedIn.