Leading Petrochemical Company Partners with Birlasoft for JD Edwards Software Upgrade for Streamlining Operations

With ever-expanding business operations of the company and its growing customer base, they were facing challenges with discordant instances of their ERP system. The Current ERP was an unsupported version which was proving as a hindrance for their future growth. Implementation of new functionalities in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 was a major driver of the upgrade, with high focus on reducing system complexity. The goal was to drive process improvement and operational excellence. The other challenges were:

• The company was facing lots of operational issues as there were no ESUs (Electronic Software Updates) done on the old software since implementation thus making it outdated and maintenance of this legacy system was cumbersome. The existing old environment inhibited the implementation of required patches to the operating system and database.
• Over the years, they had built several bolt-ons and customizations in their existing JDE Software amounting to 2452 objects. This posed a lot of standardization issues as the company was scaling its operations. With the upgrade to a higher version, most of these customizations had to be assessed, retired or replaced by standard functionalities and workarounds. Apart from these customizations, enhancements had to be made to several of these customizations in order to improve efficiencies in processes.
• There was no documentation available for existing custom objects which made it difficult for the retrofitting exercise as each and every customization had to be analyzed manually while doing the upgrade.

The upgrade was a complex one entailing numerous integrations and various customizations. The database and hardware was also upgraded. The project was completed in a span of 8 months (5 months upgrade and 3 months post go live support). The Birlasoft solution facilitated flexibility in the customer’s business operations thereby infusing operational agility which was the crucial need of the business. The technical knowledge was passed on through extensive navigational training programs across the user base. This enabled the users to see the complete walkthroughs of all the required business processes. Some of the key benefits the company gained are:

• Scalability: The upgrade to the latest version of JD Edwards ensured that it was compatible with Oracle Fusion and will continue to remain eligible for the highest levels of product support.
• Stability: The existing old environment inhibited the implementation of required patches to the operating system and database. Upgrading to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 provided stability of operations as the software leveraged on the latest performance and usability enhancements, which in turn increased efficiency of applications and optimized business processes. About 200 users can work parallel without any system issue whereas prior to the upgrade it was difficult for more than 130 users to work parallel on the process.
• Streamlined process: The upgraded infrastructure helped the company streamline intricate Finance, HR and distribution processes thereby increasing efficiency and improve performance with reduced customization complexity.
• Time and cost Savings: The optimized architecture led to optimal utilization of resources such as hardware resulting in significant cost savings for the customer. In the legacy system the bugs were fixed manually by visiting the database which was time consuming which was been taken care of in the in the upgraded system.