Energy Alloys: A Business Process-Based JD Edwards Upgrade

Energy Alloys is a global supplier of oilfield metals, services and solutions to oil and gas manufacturers and service companies. To keep up with the recent surge in demand for oil, we needed IT systems that could support the business and keep up with its pace. However, our IT department has a small staff of eight full-time and two contract employees. Using an agile project management method, and with the help of Oracle partner Smartbridge, we were able to do a complete enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrade in 60 business days with a budget of less than US$15,000.

Our successful upgrade effort, which involved upgrading from Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11 to 9.0, helped spark a new business process management (BPM) initiative which extends IT out into the business to help the company stay on top in the volatile energy industry. All value-added IT activities, including business intelligence, ERP application development, project management, and process improvement, are now part of a new group—the BPM department. A number of strategies and practices employed in the planning process enabled us to complete the upgrade with reduced cost and within a short time frame.

Business Process Management Focus

In trying to do an upgrade the traditional way, the biggest hurdle is the scope of the changes. The innovative approach at Energy Alloys was to bring a business process management focus into the entire upgrade process. The focus was to understand the business processes, not just to deliver a technical upgrade. The requirements-gathering phase was designed around the BPM mantra. The upgrade team, two business analysts and the lead developer, were very hands-on during the due diligence process. Staff members actually came down to the shop floor to learn firsthand about JD Edwards and specific work processes. They talked to the people who are doing their jobs day-in and day-out and are the real experts, which opened up the lines of communication. This started the conversation about ways to do something quicker by using JD Edwards instead of doing things outside the system.

Validation of the Business Process

When you walk through a documented business process and evaluate JD Edwards applications in terms of the process, the results are surprising. You’ll find a number of unnecessary approvals, reviews, and transactions that serve no purpose to the process owner. Reviewing the process with a fine comb eliminates the use of redundant objects, and also eliminates modifications or enhancements that were done to support a bad process.

Using New Functionality in 9.0 and Employing Best Practices

New functionality in 9.0 helped in eliminating some of the modifications in the upgrade. A feature called “Rapid Routing” eliminated the need for an enhancement where manufacturing folks would have the ability to gain efficiencies generating purchase orders on all external vendors very quickly. Tools Upgrade also gave us the ability to work seamlessly between JD Edwards grids screens and Microsoft Excel. Some of the Web services enhancements gave us the ability to interact with our customers and vendors quickly and accurately. Redesigning some of the modifications to incorporate best practices also helped. We also gained performance improvement in many of the enhancements we redesigned due to better indices and views being designed. In addition, we replaced some of the long-running processes by building business functions to reduce the runtime. All of the above reduced our initial object list of 600 modified objects to 150 objects.

Agile Project Management Methodology

Traditional project managers take on a great deal of responsibility. They are responsible for managing scope, cost, quality, personnel, communication, risk, procurement, and more. This has often put the traditional project manager in a difficult position—for example, to make scope/schedule tradeoff decisions but knowing that a product manager or customer might second-guess those decisions if the project went poorly.

Agile processes acknowledge this difficult position and distribute the traditional project manager's responsibilities. Many of these duties, such as task assignment and day-to-day project decisions, revert back to the team, where they rightfully belong. Responsibility for scope/schedule tradeoffs goes to the product owner. Quality management becomes a responsibility shared among the team, product owner, and ScrumMaster. Other traditional project management responsibilities are similarly given to one or more of these agile roles.

Development Planning

Development objects were broken down into strategic enhancements that were key for the business, and generic ones that were necessary for business. This also included identifying the complex development efforts on business functions and interactive applications in relation to the easier efforts on forms and reports. This gave us the unique visibility into the risk associated with each effort that could end up delaying the project. Critical development efforts were assigned to the lead developer, an internal resource, and generic development efforts were assigned to the offshore team of Smartbridge. This strategy resulted in time and cost savings.

Test Planning

A lot of emphasis was laid on the accuracy of the recording time it takes to execute each script during the functional test process. Business analysts made sure that they understood the overall process models and where each script fit in. Additional time was taken to document every scenario and sub scenario that were relevant.

The team used Microsoft SharePoint to collect requirements, document development objects, estimate iteration times and most importantly collaborate among all the agile team members. This data, collected during the internal testing phase, helped the team shorten the user acceptance testing cycles. It was extremely important that we leveraged the key business leaders as efficiently as possible, so this data warehouse allowed us to easily determine how long we would need each of the users for the testing exercise. At the end of the exercise, we had successfully and quickly determined our readiness to go live.

A total of three data conversion cycles were conducted to gain confidence that the offshore team from Smartbridge can in fact finish within the window. Operationalizing the upgrade project meant that there were no incremental costs for the CNC portion of the project to Energy Alloys as it was already part of the annual maintenance contract.

The unique planning and strategic direction of BPM helped the team complete the project not only within three months and within a tight budget, but also with least effect on the business.

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Kaushik Ray is director of business process management (BPM) applications at Energy Alloys.