Project Summary

After a 100 years of international growth, a privately held materials company was ready to take the next step forward by modernizing their business. This modernization effort consisted of streamlining their business processes and implementing a series of Best in Breed SaaS applications. Central to this transformation was the consolidation of their multi-national business units from JD Edwards (JDE) into Oracle’s HCM, Supply Chain Management, and Financials Cloud applications.

Recognizing both the importance and risk that data posed to the implementation, Premier was brought in to facilitate and execute the data migration process. To consider the implementation successful, Premier needed to ensure that as part of the migration, the data would be in a state that enabled the business to scale and operate within a complex application landscape.

“ You made the data conversion track look easy and fluid despite all of the complexity and effort you put in place behind the scenes.”
– Technical Team Lead

Project Risks

In order to ensure that the data would be delivered on time, scalable, and interoperable, there were a number of risk factor that needed to be overcome:

  • The large number of integrations between non-Oracle systems meant that data quality and transformations needed to meet Oracle’s functionality requirements and the requirements of all downstream applications. The complex and new business application landscape drove frequent business requirements changes throughout the course of the implementation.
  • The complexities of the integrations also impacted configuration requirements. As the configurations for integrations were overhauled with massive changes, the data conversions were forced to follow suit.
  • The tight project timelines and budget did not have sufficient leeway for changes in scope. Many HCM related modules had fluctuating requirements and scope definitions. These scope changes, along with the unexpectedly high number of changes from integrations, needed to be addressed in extremely efficient manners
  • Legacy JDE customer and vendor structures required a high degree of data transformation and enrichment to meet the Oracle Cloud and additional applications business requirements and structure.
  • Complex survivorship and harmonization rules for duplicate vendors across the international business units needed to be established and traced.
  • Data sources for HCM-related conversions had different combinations of identifying information—names (combined and split), SSNs, dates of birth, etc.—which complicated the connecting HCM employee, beneficiary, and dependent datasets.
  • Client SME lead and functional expert turnover complicated business rule definition and decision-making process as established business requirements were questioned by changed resources.

Key Activities

Premier was able to mitigate these risks through a combination of our expert consultants, our EPACTL approach to data migration, and our proprietary data migration software, Applaud®.

  • Through the business rule driven analysis and transformation features of Applaud®, Premier adapted to changing requirements and identified key downstream implications.
  • Premier facilitated discussions between legacy and target application users to coordinate requirements, using a combination of our Oracle knowledge base, data expertise, and data profile reports.
  • Applaud enabled connectors with Oracle Cloud identified configuration gaps as the pod was being configured, well before data conversion loads. These pre-emptive validations enabled the team to get ahead of configuration issues before they became problems.
  • Premier quickly integrated approved changes into the data transformation processes. Specialized testing scenarios were developed to minimize the runtime of these repeatable processes, which ensured conversion enhancements worked as expected.
  • Applaud’s® robust error handling and record tracking features accurately tracked and maintained reports for post-project auditing. These reports were especially critical for managing the complex customer and vendor data transformations.
  • Applaud’s® de-duplication processes consolidated and re-structured vendors (with their subsequent datasets, such as sites, addresses, and banking information) across business units. Additionally, USPS address standardization was used to harmonize US addresses.
  • Various complex data transformation rules reduced risk amongst HCM-related conversion objects and tied together employees, beneficiaries, and dependents across several disparate legacy sources. De-duplication rules prevented duplicate contacts between beneficiaries, dependents, and emergency contacts.
  • Premier’s project management methodology ensured that despite the shifting resources on the project, all team members were quickly brought up-to-date on previous decisions regarding selection logic and data transformation. This helped ensure a smooth transition onto the project with limited time required to inform new resources about existing, complex conversion processes.

The Results

Despite the resource turnover and numerous requirement changes within a narrow project timeline, Premier was able to work in coordination with the implementation partner and end client to ensure a successful, uneventful, and on-time go-live.

The team was able to leverage Applaud’s® specialized capabilities to adapt to ongoing requirements changes (over 300 during the final two months of the project). Premier’s methodology and experience facilitated the proactive identification and resolution of data gaps caused by requirements changes, environment configurations, and data quality before problems developed.

This resulted in a 100% of the expected records loading successfully into the Oracle Cloud applications, data that allows the business to grow, scale, and flow through their complex application ecosystem.

The Applaud® Advantage

To help overcome the expected data migration challenges, the organization engaged Premier International’s Applaud® data migration services. 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.