Jenner Jensen, Director of Business Solutions, and Brian Hale, Manager of Technical and Cloud Operations, spoke about how Federal Signal, a large multi-national manufacturing company, moved their on-premise JD Edwards EnterpriseOne system to the Oracle Public Cloud.

Key Project Drivers

There were several drivers that led to Federal Signal’s decision to move their JD Edwards system to the Oracle Cloud. Some of these drivers include:

• Their current contract with their hosting provider in a hosted data center was up for renewal.
• They had an antiquated system with browser capability issues.
• They were on third-party support, which limited options for implementing new JD Edwards functionality.

All of these factors drove Federal Signal to make a decision about what the next move for their company’s ERP system would be and what option would work best for them.

Federal Signal’s Options for Moving Forward

Federal Signal had a few options to consider as they move forward with their decision about their ERP system. They could either:

• Renegotiate their contract with their incumbent provider.
• Partner with a new hosting provider.
• Build in-house using new technology.
• Move to the Cloud.

After much deliberation, Federal Signal ultimately decided it was time to move their ERP system into the Cloud—specifically the Oracle Public Cloud.

Stages of Implementation

Federal Signal divided the implementation project into two phases in an attempt to reduce complexity and risk. The ability to reduce these two factors was a big selling point to get users and executives to buy into this project.

Phase 1 of the implementation consisted of a Lift and Shift of the JD Edwards 8.11 environment into the Public Cloud. This first phase had no business impact, and that was a major reason that Federal Signal decided to order the phases in this way. Going through the first phase without major disruption was another selling point to get users and executives to buy into the implementation project. In addition to having no business impact, they saw a successful cutover in just four months.

Phase 2 was the more complex piece of the project—the JD Edwards application upgrade. Federal Signal had to follow the steps of moving from 8.11 > 9.1 > 9.2. They gathered leaders from each of their big manufacturing plants to create an Executive Level Steering Committee that helped get others on board and support the project. Rather than have everyone on the project team always tied up in meetings with all the moving parts of the projects, the Federal Signal team decided to manage Phase 2 as four sub-projects to help improve the focus of the team. With this approach, the team had more time to spend actually doing the work instead of spending all of their times in various meetings. The four sub-projects included:

1. Technical timeline: The goal was to get the work done quickly, but they had to ask themselves: Could this be done over the timeframe of a weekend (2-3 days)?
2. JDE customizations: Federal Signal had between 2,000-3,000 customizations in their system that they wanted to move to their new environment.
3. Third-party systems configuration: There were 27 integrations into Federal Signal’s JDE system that needed to move as part of the implementation.
4. Business testing and approval: Federal Signal knew that finishing the technical work did not mean that their project was complete. They needed to dedicate resources to get people to dedicate time for testing and getting comfortable with the new system.

Lessons Learned

Throughout their implementation process, there were several lessons that Federal Signal learned from their project. A few that they shared include:

• Test incrementally—vanilla first, before third-party systems or customizations have been implemented
• Schedule the “easy” or clearly defined work early on
• Expect legacy IT settings to cause challenges
• Plan for transition costs such as swing hardware
• Document technical processes up front
• Limit the assumptions made
• During the business testing phase, expect tensions to rise—full transparency and good communication are key during this time
• Have a clear production support hand-off process post cutover
• Partners are crucial to a successful execution