Lancashire Constabulary's Seamless Oracle EBS Split and Upgrade with DSP

LanCon used Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 for its finance, HR and payroll functions as part of a shared service owned and managed by Lancashire County Council (“LCC”). LCC’s service included running key business processes such as payroll. When LCC decided to replace Oracle EBS with Oracle Cloud Applications, LanCon wished to remain on EBS, yet there wasn’t a clear way to achieve this. Claremont (now DSP) had prior experience in splitting Oracle EBS systems to support companies’ divestments, and engaged DSP to deliver a similar solution for LanCon.

DSP's solution is unique and fills gaps in Oracle’s standard functionality. When organisations or, in LanCon’s case, shared services are broken up, the divested organisation must usually continue using their current system with all its history. This requires a two-stage process: first, the system is cloned; next, data not owned by the divested organisation must be deleted. Cloning Oracle EBS is straightforward but no standard solution exists to selectively purge data. However, DSP has proven solution to do just that.

A further challenge was LCC used version 12.1.3 of EBS and had already paid one year of Oracle’s Market Driven Support to maintain access to support and patches. LanCon and DSP agreed the system should be upgraded to 12.2 during the migration such that LanCon used the latest version from go-live. That would mean LanCon need not pay further MDS fees.

DSP cloned LCC's production EBS system to a new LanCon tenancy on DSP Cloud, and this copy was kept up-to-date through the application of archive logs. Four test upgrade and migration cycles were performed on clones of this environment to practice the planned live upgrade and migration, identify any issues and provide assurance that LanCon’s system would function correctly. Maintaining an up-to-date copy of the LCC production system greatly de-risked the go-live because the database was only copied once, at the project’s start.

A particular challenge for the upgrade was that little was known about the system’s customisations. Documentation was limited, and LCC’s focus on its Cloud Applications project left little time to assist DSP.  DSP mitigated this lack of knowledge by reverse engineering key customisations. Having determined what customisations existed and their functionality, DSP was able to successfully upgrade all required customisations. The upgrade and migration were performed successfully over a weekend, and LanCon’s staff were unaffected by this transition.

In parallel with the migration project, DSP configured and tested its data purge solution for LanCon. The purge scope was significant because the system had been used by multiple public sector organisations in addition to LCC. Furthermore, a wide range of modules, including financials, procurement, HCM and payroll, had been used for many years. Thus, data volumes were significant, and it was a complex undertaking to ensure all data other than LanCon’s was purged. After several cycles of development and testing, the purge solution was signed off on soon after LanCon began production use of its new EBS system. DSP then used this solution to purge all non-LanCon data from LanCon’s EBS environments.

On completion of the upgrade and migration project, DSP commenced delivery of a 5-year Cloud hosting and managed service to support LanCon. However, having not previously owned and maintained EBS and, in some cases, having not run key business processes, DSP provided additional support for LanCon during and after the project. For example, DSP helped ensure LanCon was correctly licensed while minimising costs and supported LanCon’s teams in taking on business processes previously executed by LCC.