Having participated on many HCM and Talent Management upgrade projects in various roles such as Developer, Business Analyst, Architect and Project Manager I am dismayed at the amount of time, resources and money the traditional upgrades consume.
Prior to the Oracle acquisition, PeopleSoft correctly determined that ERP upgrades were consuming the budgets of their customers when those dollars could be used to purchase additional modules instead. They started working on a new methodology to make PeopleSoft upgrades go much faster (and thus cheaper) than the traditional upgrade . Unfortunately for both Oracle and the PeopleSoft customers that new methodology was never actually implemented.
I think it is time for the ERP vendors to go back to the drawing board and re-think the upgrade process. There is some amazing technology out there from vendors such as Oracle for virtualization. Oracle Enterprise Manager will let you create a new virtual server and deploy an application with just a few keystrokes (or at least that is what they show in a demo). How about taking that virtualization paradigm to figure out how to create an upgrade process that takes hours and not days, weeks and months to upgrade a system.
As companies start looking at the enormous costs associated with upgrades, I suspect many of them will take a left turn and evaluate the cost benefit of in-house ERP upgrades versus the costs associated with converting to SaaS. On the HR application side, many of the traditional ERP systems are starting to show their age. HR SaaS vendors have created much more user friendly systems and they tend to implement additional functionality on quarterly basis versus the year to two year cycle of a traditional ERP.
So, come on ERP vendors…streamline my upgrade please!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Agree 100%, ERP upgrades are one of the most negative aspects of running ERP. They almost always take longer, deliver less, and put all other work on hold as you test iteration after iteration of the upgrade itself. Having to upgrade an entire ERP suite just to get access to two or three new pieces of functionality you want is a steep price to pay.
I think you are shortchanging the upgrade positives. There are more than 2 or 3 additional pieces of functionality across an entire suite, and there are usually benefits of improved performance and reliability, which are often unseen on the ‘functional’ side.
I have managed my share of upgrades, both monolithic and simple. If the business has not changed any core functionality, and has well documented changes and controls, even a large installation can be upgraded at minimal cost. The problem is, few places maintain the proper change controls and documentation, and therefore have no idea what they have done to the system and thus need to test everything to the nth degree. Even having a lot of extensions can still have a rapid upgrade process if everything is documented properly.
Steve and Steve: Turns out both of you are correct. ERP upgrades can take a long time, cost a lot of money and ultimately not deliver the goods or they can go quickly, smoothly and add much needed functionality. Unfortunately in my experience, even the best managed upgrades (did I mention I am a terrific Project Manager) take a long time from planning to production and often fail to deliver additional functionality that is actually needed by the customer without purchasing additional modules. In the end, both the business users and the technical team “get something” good from the upgrade but I am not convinced the costs associated with the upgrade are recouped from the additional functionality of the new release.