When it comes to implementing JD Edwards, a solid plan is often the first step toward seamlessly integrating the solution into the company’s system. There needs to be a clear understanding on why the team has to take on such a major endeavor, and just as equally important, a clear blueprint that details the path toward successfully meeting goals and critical milestones.

One of the many mistakes companies commit when integrating JD Edwards is starting the project without a strategic focus. Having a sound plan, after all, is simply winning half of the battle. The other half is the ability to get the job done — and this requires a targeted focus on the part of the leadership and team involved.

UBC, a life sciences company that helps bring drugs to market, knows how critical it is to have a focused vision. After all, this was a lesson they all learned the hard way.

Maintain a strategic focus.

UBC was once part of Medco Health Solutions Inc., which was bought out by Express Scripts, Inc. (ESI), a pharmacy benefit management company, back in 2007. When ESI was bought by Cigna last year, UBC went under the ownership of a private equity company.

“The history of JDE in UBC is a little complicated. Back then, Medco selected JDE as their ERP of choice, and within the time of actually implementing and paying for it, they were bought out by ESI, which had all the ERPs, from Oracle to E-Business Suite,” says Director, UBC Systems Hasan Khan.

At that time, the executive team decided to install JD Edwards only in the UBC side of the business, not on the ESI side. As a result, ERP wasn’t top priority. “They tapped Oracle [experts] and a few other consultants to do the implementation. After the implementation, pretty much everyone involved left,” recalls Khan.

The major modules implemented were: Financials, Project Accounting, Procurement and Time-Entry. January 2013 was the go-live period. “It was a less than ideal go-live. What happened was they didn’t convert everything. They just picked one business for JD Edwards, while the entire business was running on a different ERP, Sage Mas500,” says Khan.

Bring on board the right team.

To help address the disconnect and lack of direction, a new chief financial officer was hired and tasked by ESI to oversee UBC in 2015. “He brought along with him his own team. In early 2016, I was hired to look at UBC’s ERP platform,” Khan says.

After a process of evaluation, the team assessed that there was a need for a re-implementation of JD Edwards. “We implemented everything, including creating new hierarchies for chart of accounts and time-entry was modified to suit what is good for us. Overall, employee engagement on the software increased. At the moment, UBC has more than 2,000 employees and almost all them use JD Edwards,” says Khan.

Strive to combine systems to improve efficiency.

When UBC went through a process of reimplementation, they had multiple business initiatives to factor in. “A lot of things have changed. New interfaces were created. New applications were designed to accommodate business, making it more friendly. The most important is the ERP consolidation. Instead of running three ERPS, everything is now reporting to JD Edwards,” says Khan.

In total, the reimplementation was a two-year process. Although they created new charts using tactical and hierarchies, they did not modify the original chart. “We also installed Hubble and change all of our reporting from JD Edwards to Hubble so that, with our hierarchy, we won’t have the issue of things not showing up properly in parental reporting as well as creating different dashboards for our finance group and executives to see,” Khan explains.

Stay code-current by promptly upgrading systems.

With technology constantly evolving, it is important to stay current. UBC had dropped Oracle support for a few years causing a severe lag in getting all required ESUs which could have kept their system in better shape. After relicensing maintenance support, UBC upgraded their system to 9.2.1. The upgrade process took 86 days. “We moved away from customization with about 300+ base objects to 28 base objects during the 86 days of work,” Khan says. Their go-live date for the recent upgrade was March last year.

User feedback on the 9.2 upgrade was positive. “Users love it! I sent out a survey participation to 200 users. About 110 of them replied. Out of that, 95 percent have a positive response,” he says.

In addition, they put in a few customizations along with the upgrade to make the solution user-friendly. “One of the major reasons for the upgrade is not only to stay code-current and actually be in the support tier, but also as a reviewing recognition standards that’s made to be implemented,”  he says.

UBC’s ERP consolidation finished in June of this year. “After that, we will be looking on the UX side, citizen developer, pushing that concept out, as well as working on advanced job call casting and those modules. So that is in the timetable for toward the end of this year, as well as starting a disaster recovery plan,” Khan says.

Despite a rough start in the implementation process, UBC proves that having a strategic focus will steer the process back into place. With a clear vision, a seamless integration is not impossible to achieve.