Quest spoke with Kent West, IT Infrastructure Manager at Roy Jorgensen Associates, Inc. about the company’s 9.2 upgrade and journey toward code current.

About Roy Jorgensen Associates, Inc.

Roy Jorgensen Associates, Inc. is a global provider of comprehensive highway and facilities services. The firm has served 20 countries and 37 U.S. states and territories, including Puerto Rico. They provide infrastructure services, facility and management services, engineering manuals, and consulting and maintenance services. The company’s global headquarters is in Buckeystown, Maryland.

Jorgensen first implemented JD Edwards in 2008 on EnterpriseOne release 9.0. The company upgraded to 9.2 at the end of 2016. It was done in five months, on time and under budget. They now run Financials, Distribution, Payroll and HR and Work Orders. They built 9.2 in all new hardware/VM, and they are moving toward being 100 percent virtualized.

Visit Roy Jorgensen’s Website

Did you run into any issues during your 9.2 upgrade?

One of the biggest issues was the large amount of custom code in our system from our 2008 implementation. However, we decided to use this opportunity to document all our modifications. We used the Customization Object Analyzer to determine our customizations and begin analyzing why the code was written and how we could reduce customizations with the functionality delivered in 9.2. We now have policies in place for a paradigm shift of no modifications.

Do you have any best practices for customers going through the same thing?

Things that we think worked well included not modifying Base Objects, saving the location, maintaining good documentation, Change Management, and requiring a line of business to justify any modification that someone wants to make.

What advantages do you see in being code current?

Being code current means that you’re current with Oracle support, so you have access to all the latest bug fixes. You can also take advantage of new features that come along.

It also allows you to take advantage of the JD Edwards continuous delivery, which means getting software in shorter cycles, incremental updates to the applications you have in production, time and cost saving, and reduced risk of potential disruption from a major upgrade.

Also, your upgrade compatibility and third-party applications compatibility are maintained as well.

What are the company’s future plans?

We plan to take updates once a year, around the second quarter, when resources are available. Also, we’re now looking at 9.2.3 and UX One with respect to how the personalization framework might be able to rid us of our last remaining mods!.

“9.2 positions us for a continuous adoption of code and through that adoption, enables us to remove a certain amount of modified code to reduce the cost of code current, and going forward having an overall reduction in our total cost of ownership.” 

 -Kent West, IT Infrastructure Manager, Roy Jorgensen Associates, Inc.