Leading Enterprise Netsuite Upgrades While Maintaining Business Continuity
OVERVIEW
Our client, an industry leader in cloud networking solutions for large data center and campus environments, has earned a sterling reputation for products and services that are intelligent, reliable, flexible and secure. Much like other leading enterprise companies, our client relies on a portfolio of IT systems and infrastructure to enable and deliver these products and services successfully.
In order to manage the multitude of operational and transactional processes that drive their global business, our client utilizes an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, NetSuite. Over the years, they have strategically expanded their system’s capabilities with hundreds of tailor-made solutions for their operations - and now possess an extraordinarily valuable, multi-functional platform that serves as the backbone for their entire organization.
NetSuite, not unlike other enterprise platforms, requires and provides systemwide updates to all its customers on a regular basis. For NetSuite, these release upgrades happen through two major annual upgrades and can include anything from minor updates to major changes that have the potential to make significant impacts, especially to highly customized versions of their platform.
By virtue of these intensive and extensive customizations, our client experiences extreme vulnerability each time a new release upgrade is implemented. Any single customization not properly tested, vetted, and accepted can mean significant issues across multiple parts of the business, from order management and accounting to critical manufacturing processes.
THE CHALLENGE
With more than 400 customizations and unique specifications to NetSuite, our client continually faced downtime for each new release and implementation. Productivity delays, broken functionality, processes and resource strains became the unfortunate norm.
The challenge was clear: successfully planning, managing and leading release upgrade preparedness efforts was critical to ensure minimal business disruption and avoid negative, cascading impacts throughout their highly-customized system.
Thus, their question became, “How can we ensure our ERP stays up and running, mid-new release, without impacting business operations?”
THE SOLUTION
Over the years, our client has trusted us to lead and manage significant IT projects. When presented with the opportunity to help them with their release upgrade challenge, we knew exactly how to help. Release upgrade preparedness consists of several different elements:
Proactive readiness and communications
Review of system changes and critical milestones
Release framework creation and testing approach
Planning for post-upgrade activities
These elements needed to be orchestrated effectively through strong program management and leadership, especially considering the limited resources available to support the effort and the pipeline of ongoing projects that could not be disrupted.
Review & Analysis
To ensure project success, G1 constantly engages in proactive communication with NetSuite to receive a preview six weeks ahead of the release. We are the voice for our client with NetSuite and handle all the numerous release planning discussions to ensure we are prepared.
Our experience has taught us that these discussions with NetSuite well ahead of the release allow us to identify and prepare for larger system changes well in advance. Knowing what to discuss is more than half the challenge, and this is where our expertise provides value.
This engagement with NetSuite is critical as it helps us define our release upgrade preparedness timeline, framework, testing approach and more.
Impact Analysis & Upcoming Changes
After receiving the release preview, we begin the huge undertaking of reviewing over 150 pages of release notes with the IT team. While not all changes might be relevant to our client’s system, a thorough analysis of the release notes helps us uncover:
Minor fixes that solve known issues
Critical changes that impact business operations
Required system downtime
Potential future impact considerations
New, beneficial system features
As our client is a publicly traded company, our G1-directed activities and protocols need to be executed in accordance with financial and legal compliance regulations. Any release changes that might affect regulated processes need to be assessed and prepared for accordingly.
Building the Framework and Success Plan
Next, we built a client-specific framework specifically for testing planning, protocols, execution and Go-Live Support Monitoring.
Everyone wants a roadmap for success. Not every organization has the resources to create one. And for those who do, not every roadmap is battle tested, agile, and constructed in such a way as to receive new inputs as change inevitably occurs.
The G1 framework allows us to properly allocate the requisite resources in an effective manner for our client. The infrastructure document also creates the successful roadmap of tasks, milestones, and project timelines. Each release requires a wide range of resources to be successful - from technical developers to SMEs in various business areas including the EDI, Order Management, Finance, Manufacturing and Infrastructure teams. We engage with all the various business units and the corresponding IT teams to ensure that a proper assessment of the impact is included in our framework.
Plan Deployment
After our implementation plan has been finalized with stakeholder input, we deploy a team of testing resources, including functional SMEs and QAs focused on regression testing of past enhancements, onto the client’s 400 enhancements and customizations. Simultaneously, the scripting team starts the impact analysis of the technical enhancements.
The QA team starts with testing all past enhancements. The foundation must be rock solid before we add on. Over time we have built an extensive, thorough and comprehensive library of 650 test cases.
The project team for our client’s upgrade consists of 15-20 IT resources. Every customization is tested to ensure a new release will not create a negative impact on our client’s system. We direct Solution Architects to create effective test cases. These test cases must encompass any new enhancements implemented since the previous release - but remain concise enough so that all team members can understand and test.
We ensure testers understand the testing protocol and correct use and application of the test cases. Each component of the testing regimen is then recorded as a positive or negative impact. Any defects located during testing are reported back to NetSuite to resolve prior to release deployment for our client and others. If the issue found is specific to our client, we begin a system enhancement to rectify an issue before it ever hits our client’s production account.
Another significant element of release preparedness is ensuring that business stakeholders are brought into the testing process. Since NetSuite performs critical business operations across the enterprise, we identify a business team to help us perform User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
By the time the release fully propagates, we will have successfully constructed end-to-end testing with 25 business units. Everyone from finance, tax, manufacturing, management, accounts receivable, and our client’s overseas entities can function without system issues from one day to the next. Everyone from finance, tax, manufacturing, management, accounts receivable, and our client’s overseas entities are involved to ensure they can function without system upgrade-related issues. Over 30 external and internal integrations with other systems will have been tested and validated as well.
THE OUTCOME
We have now run six consecutive NetSuite upgrades flawlessly, without a single minute of outage. G1 has the proven, customized framework and expertise to keep our client’s business humming without interruption.
Our effective, dedicated communication has proven to be a big win for business users. We facilitate business conversations, testing, program and resource management, strategic planning, and the ability to craft and execute a custom-made framework for successfully managing their unceasing upgrade problem.