Quest got a chance to talk to Javier Garcia, IT Director of Business Solutions, and Venkat Maganti, Technical Manager, EnterpriseOne, CNC and Oracle Applications, from M.D.C. Holdings.  MDC is the parent company that manufactures homes under the more familiar moniker, Richmond American Homes, one of the top fifteen home construction companies in the United States. The Richmond American Homes companies have homebuilding operations in ten states with a solid reputation for quality and attention to detail.

Key Takeaways

“The upgrade to 9.2 gave us a window of opportunity to refresh our infrastructure and now we are more stable and future ready.”-Venkat Maganti, Technical Manager JDE EOne CNC Architecture, Oracle Applications and FMW at M.D.C. Holdings Inc.

About Richmond American Homes 

M.D.C. Holdings, the parent company of Richmond American Homes, has been changing the home industry standard by setting higher standards of homebuilding personalization, quality and customer service ever since they built their first house in Denver, Colo., back in 1977. Since then, The Richmond American subsidiaries have since built more than 195,000 homes nationwide.

They upgraded from 9.0 to 9.2 in less than 80 days by using the Simplified Upgrade process with the Customization Object Analyzer and saw multiple benefits. They saw immediate performance gains and stability of the system.

They are using One View Reporting, Financials, General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Job Costing, Procurement, Homebuilding as well as Oracle Business Intelligence,

Were you able to obsolete any customizations when you transitioned from 9.0 to 9.2?

Yes, using the Object Analyzer report, we were able to eliminate approximately 15 percent of our customizations.

Are you going to implement Watchlists? 

Yes. They’re already in use. When I login, I can see which projects are in production and updates on those projects.  From a business point of view, we created a watchlist which displays the big contracts which are about to expire.  Also, watchlists has simplified the process for vendor management by tracking vendor’s liability insurance to ensure they are compliant.

Have you implemented One View Reporting?

Yes, we have licensed OVR and some users are using it, but we are in the process of implementing it more widely across the organization.  It is the number one benefit of the upgrade.  Enabling business analysts and power users to create and run their own reports takes the burden off of IT.

Now that you’re on 9.2, do you have a plan to stay current?

That is one thing we made sure of when we moved to 9.2. When Oracle releases an upgrade pack, we can run Object Analyzer to see what objects have changed. It saves us a lot of time testing.

Were business users happy about 9.2?

It was a win-win for everyone here. We have many performance gains, and we’re much more stable than before!  They are excited about One View Reporting and Watchlists.

What, to you, were the best benefits of upgrading to 9.2?

We’d say the main benefit of upgrading to 9.2 is a 100% refresh of the architecture. We went cutting-edge on our technology, and our performance has improved by leaps and bounds as we’ve transitioned to 9.2.

Any other pieces of advice for JD Edwards users?

If you don’t have the in-house resources to do it, don’t skimp and do it yourself, engage a good business partner.  I recommend getting an executive sponsor before you begin the project and make sure you have executive buy-in for the project.  Good project management and planning are key to a successful project.