Presented at INFOCUS 2023
Session ID: 100270

Summary: We are a Global Medical device company with 7 manufacturing locations and 15+ distribution locations worldwide. We have a sizeable JD Edwards user base of 4900 plus users using all modules Finance, Distribution, Manufacturing in addition to Supplier Portal and Customer Portal applications. Our JD Edwards instance involves customizations, localization, multiple languages, bolt-ons and countries with multiple currencies. We initiated our journey to upgrade our JDE instance in 2022 from base application release 9.2 (32-bit) to JDE application release R22 (64-bit) with tools release 9.2.5.3 to R23 (9.7.2.2) and completed the upgrade in less than 12 months.

Challenges:
1. How to stay code current with a highly customized JDE ERP system: All customizations needed to be retrofitted while our business-critical projects were in flight and never stopped. That meant we did not have the privilege to freeze our code set.
2. How to reduce our monthly downtime during code deployments: One of the challenges we faced with our old system was the monthly downtime required during project deployments. As we are a global company with presence all over the globe, we have business processes running 24×7, which means any downtime to the JDE system has a direct impact to our business processes.

Solution: Journey to keep our JDE Instance code current and achieve zero downtime deployments:
1. Used out of the box tools and developed a few of our own to deploy smart retrofit processes, while releasing new capabilities (monthly production releases) and keep code current.
2. Implemented POD architecture which helped us achieve Zero Downtime Deployments. Key to successful Upgrade to 64-bit JDE.