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Oracle has discontinued its support for EBS 12.1.x, meaning that enterprises now have no choice but to upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.2. This upgrade not only future proofs your ERP, but also offers additional benefits, including Oracle’s premier support, enhanced security patches, and continuous upgrades until 2032. In the long run, the upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.2 will help organizations keep pace with Oracle’s frequent changes, allowing them to act nimbly when responding to changing business needs.
That being said, this upgrade can be a cumbersome process with many moving parts. The purpose of this blog post is to give you a high-level guide for how to navigate this change.
Download the E-book: Testing Strategy Guide for Upgrading to Oracle EBS 12.2
What to know about Oracle’s Short-Term Support Services
Enterprises that are currently using EBS 12.1.3 and plan to move to Oracle EBS 12.2 can continue to lean on Oracle’s Market-Driven Support for E-Business Suite 12.1. This service is offered by Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS), and is meant to support users as they begin their upgrade process. While this support will be available until 2023, the following service components are not available with this Support:
- Critical fixes and/or workarounds for the newly discovered product issues resulting in Severity 1 and 2 Service Requests
- Periodic critical security patches and updates
- Legislative and regulatory updates, as well as payroll-tax updates for selected countries
Key Considerations while planning EBS 12.2 Upgrade
It should be now be clear that EBS 12.1 customers must upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.2, as Oracle’s support for 12.1 will stop in 2023. To ensure a seamless, stress-free upgrade to EBS 12.2.X, customers should keep the following points in mind.
Upgrade Options for EBS 12.1.x Users
Oracle offers three upgrade options to existing EBS customers – Technical Upgrade, Functional Upgrade or a Hybrid Upgrade.
The scope of release upgrade includes:
- Upgrade Advisory and Upgrade Assessment
- CEMLIs Upgrade Services
- Three rounds of migrations/upgrades testing
- A full production-upgrade
- A month of post-production support
- Overall Upgrade Project Services
At a minimum, this upgrade to 12.2 should involve the following activities
Additionally, to fulfil the objectives of this upgrade, an initial assessment is needed to establish a baseline for:
- Business processes
- CEMLIs
- Applications performance
- Test assets & Test scripts (if automated)
- Functional and technical documentation
Upgrade testing is performed over 3 iterations for Dev, Test, and Pre-Prod environments in CRP1/ Unit testing, CRP2/ System Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing.
The Importance of Testing
Enterprises must understand that testing is a critical component for a successful EBS upgrade. To ensure that there is no broken functionality in the upgraded environment, rigorous tests need to be scripted, performed, and maintained.
To ensure that minimal disruptions occur post go-live, QA teams must test all possible business scenarios. Doing so manually is simply not feasible, from a business sense: it’s impossible to test all scenarios, and it’s expensive and time consuming. By implementing automated Oracle EBS testing, enterprises can easily address the drawbacks of the manual testing approach, and achieve a seamless upgrade to Oracle 12.2. Also, check out our post that outlines Oracle EBS Upgrade testing types.
Expedite your Oracle EBS Upgrade with Opkey
Opkey has helped hundreds of EBS customers successfully upgrade to EBS 12.2.X with:
Optimal Test Coverage: Opkey autonomously mines your existing test cases and also performs a test gap analysis—ensuring test coverage of 100% in a span of just days. With Opkey, customers can click one button to transform their existing manual tests into continuous, automated tests for faster testing cycles.
Self-configuring Data: Opkey mines your transaction data and configurations, and can easily feed them into test automation scripts. You can then make them test execution ready with one-click.
Autonomous Impact Assessment: Opkey’s AI-powered Impact Assessment feature ensures a faster upgrade to 12.2.X by providing a 360-degree view of impacted/updated business flows & customizations.
End-to-End Testing: With Opkey, all integrated applications and middle ware use cases can be tested across your end-to-end business workflows. Furthermore, you can run tests across multiple EBS versions and browsers such as Chrome, Edge or IE with Opkey.
Want a Risk-free Upgrade to EBS 12.X?
And if you’re beginning to think about migrating your Oracle EBS to Oracle cloud, check out our post that outlines how to ensure a seamless migration.
