If you’ve been running JD Edwards World for a while, you have probably considered upgrading at some point. Whether that means upgrading your World environment or transitioning to EnterpriseOne, it can be a daunting task. Especially because, if you’ve been running JD Edwards for five, ten, or even 15 years, then you’ve probably modified your system pretty heavily over the years.
But even if your organization isn’t quite ready to undergo an upgrade, now is a great time to reevaluate your system and clean up what you can. Preparing your JD Edwards environment for an upgrade, whether you go through with the upgrade or not, will help prepare for the future and pay off some technical debt along the way.
Technical debt accrues when a piece of hardware or software is installed but it isn’t kept updated. Instead, a big upgrade has to take place down the line, taking up a lot of time and resources. It’s much more effective to make smaller updates over time and keep your software up to date.
After a decade or so of running and modifying JD Edwards, things can get a little messy. Instead of diving head first into an upgrade, we suggest first going through and reevaluating all of your modifications to validate that they are necessary and still used.
Some of your mods were probably put in at the time of implementation and are no longer needed. Coupled with the fact that your team has gotten more knowledgeable about using JDE over the years, and you may be able to leverage JDE in ways that make those mods obsolete.
Some of this will require going back to the business users and asking whether they are still using a modification and whether or not it is still valid. Is it something that could be replaced by using a base functionality configuration? If so, make that change.
One of our clients was faced with this dilemma recently, and after evaluating their system they decided to take their JDE program back to the base version and only bring forward the handful of customizations that they really needed. From there they are able to use base JDE functionality for everything else.
Not only does this remove customizations, but it gets the system prepared for a potential future upgrade and starts to pay back the technical debt that has been accumulated over the years.
Are you thinking of upgrading your JD Edwards environment, or just have a lot of modifications that could be streamlined? Contact our team of JD Edwards experts to find your solution.
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