The advancement of cloud applications has changed perception about the lifecycle of enterprise software and along with that, has changed expectations. To move to the selective adoption model and stay current with their Oracle support agreement, Kal Tire made the decision to upgrade their HCM application.
Based on the reviews, Kal Tire determined that this would be primarily a technical upgrade, with a deeper look at work centres during the upgrade project to determine if they would be useful to the team members in payroll. Having defined the scope and the project schedule in detail, the upgrade project was successfully completed in six months.
The advancement of cloud applications has changed perception about the lifecycle of enterprise software and along with that, has changed expectations. Organisations now want the ability to add business value incrementally without the high cost of expensive upgrades every three to five years. And they also want the ability to choose what they want and the timing of when to apply them so that changes are not disruptive to their business cycle.
In response to these changes in expectations and emerging industry standards, Oracle changed the way that maintenance and new enhancements are delivered and applied for PeopleSoft. The selective adoption model eliminated the need for expensive major upgrades as well as other key benefits that presented a compelling business case to move to PeopleSoft 9.2. In order to move to the selective adoption model and also to stay current with their Oracle support agreement, Kal Tire made the decision to upgrade their HCM application to 9.2 and PeopleTools to 8.55.
To help achieve their goal of upgrading their PeopleSoft HCM application to the next version, Kal Tire turned to NTT DATA, leveraging its successful implementation and upgrade experience. NTT DATA provided project management, functional and technical expertise.
This successful upgrade was undertaken in two projects:
To ensure the upgrade was scoped and budgeted correctly, NTT DATA worked with Kal Tire to plan for their upgrade, in which two key areas of analysis were completed.
Based on the reviews, Kal Tire determined that this would be primarily a technical upgrade, with a deeper look at work centres during the upgrade project to determine if they would be useful to the team members in payroll. The outcome resulted in a detailed plan to accomplish the technical upgrade, a project definition document which clearly outlined the project scope, along with the schedule and stakeholders. The timing for the upgrade passes was also agreed during the planning phase, allocating sufficient time for both the functional team and developers to complete their tasks.
Having defined the scope and the project schedule in detail, the upgrade project was successfully completed in six months and included the following key elements:
Overall, the project was completed on time and under budget. The initial pass and test moves one, two, and three completed on the agreed schedule and the final move to production occurred on schedule over a weekend. The users of the system were pleased with the Fluid navigation as it was very easy to determine where in the application one needed to navigate to perform a task. There were no calls to the help desk on day one and only two small items to be resolved. The first off-cycle payroll ran on day three of production with no issue and on-cycle payroll ran smoothly the second week of production.
*This case study was originally written by Sierra Systems Group Inc., which has become NTT DATA Services as of 17th December 2018.