If you’re wondering what are the benefits of upgrading to Oracle EBS 12.2, this blog is for you. In this article, we’ll discuss why you should upgrade to EBS 12.2, what are the benefits associated with this, and how to do this right.
Top benefits of upgrading Oracle EBS to R12.2
Premier Support: If you’re an existing Oracle EBS customer, you must be aware that Oracle has stopped offering premier support till EBS R12.1. It means that even though you’ve paid for support in the licensing fee, you’ll not get critical patch updates, security alerts, data fixes, and updates related to new tax or regulatory requirements. Furthermore, Oracle will not certify new third-party products and versions. Saying it otherwise, you’ll no longer remain compliant. However, upgrading Oracle EBS to R12.2 will make you eligible for premier support for another 10 years. Oracle has announced that it will keep on providing support to EBS R12.2 version till 2031.
Continuous Innovation: Oracle works on the principle of “Continuous Innovation”. It means that once you’re on EBS 12.2, you don’t need any major upgrade. However, Oracle will keep on delivering “critical patch units” and adding features and functionalities to help you efficiently manage your business.
Online Patching: Previously, patching led to serious downtime. So, EBS customers were required to implement patches as quickly as possible to reduce downtime. By upgrading to EBS 12.2, you don’t have to worry about any downtime since patches can be applied while your system is running and fully operational. EBS R12.2 upgrade significantly reduces maintenance downtime.
Intuitive User Experience: EBS 12.2 comes in a new look and feel to offer enhanced user experience. Users will get a notification alert and can adjust widths of widgets. To improve productivity, EBS 12.2 also supports mobility. Users can have access to corporate data with the help of smartphones.
As you’re now aware about the benefits of upgrading Oracle EBS to 12.2, you need to understand that upgrading to EBS 12.2 is the last difficult upgrade you need to perform. For risk-free EBS upgrade, you need to follow the given below tips.
● CEMLI Evaluation: CEMLI stands for configurations/ customization, extension, modification, localization and internationalization, and integration. During EBS upgrade, you need to evaluate the functionality as well as CEMLI to understand the dependencies on the developers. This also provides you with the scope of the project. However, customizations need to be protected from being overwritten during the upgrade process. To ensure this, extensive testing needs to be done to check whether the changes in tables or APIs haven’t impacted the existing customizations.
● CEMLI Retrofitment: As there’s a possibility that some of the customizations need to be replaced with the standard functionality, you need to test all the CEMLI to make sure that standard features and functionalities are satisfying the business requirements that were previously met with the custom code.
● Upgrade testing: Test scripts that were used initially during EBS implementation needs to be used again as baseline to check the functionality of the apps post upgrade. For this, test scripts need to be retrofitted and additional scripts need to be written to check business process deviations.
● UAT: It is the final round of testing that needs to be performed by end users to check whether or not the upgraded system is meeting up their expectations and helping them in doing day-to-day working.
As you now know best practices for EBS upgrade, you must be aware of the important testing during upgrade. As multiple rounds of testing is required, it is needless to say that you should stick to manual testing approaches. Manual testing is not only time consuming and error prone but also plagued with inadequate risks.
To ensure that your EBS upgrade remains risk-free and within timelines, you need to bring in test automation. If you’re wondering which are the rightful Oracle EBS testing tools for this, there are many paid and open source tools available in the market. However, while selecting test automation tools for Oracle EBS, keep in mind that business users play a critical role in successful upgrades. They are non-technical persons. So, it would be good if you bring in a zero code test automation platform that can be operated with minimum training.
