Summary:
We are going to migrate from 8.01 HRMS to 8.8. At the same time we will be re-evaluating our customizations and attempting to decustomize our system as much as possible. Our business unit, deptid and jobcodes will be revamped too. My developers are recommending implementation of a vanilla 8.8 system and porting transformed data to the vanilla platform. Has anyone gone through an upgrade this way?

Answer1

No matter how you hope to approach your upgrade, you will be most successful if you develop a custom approach that understands the specific details of your system. Our most recent upgrade to 8.4 used both the delivered application engine process and customized database utilities to transform our 7.5 data into 8.4 data. Given the time I would advocate doing away with the PeopleSoft delivered process and doing it all with custom database utilities.

If you are going to a vanilla system from a highly customized system, you will be forced to create custom processes to transform your data as PeopleSoft has no way to deliver a solution that knows about all of your customizations. Your developers are on the right track. Setting up the vanilla system and then bringing in your data after changing it as needed for the vanilla system is a very logical and thorough approach to your situation.

Answer2

I have seen an upgrade from version 6 to version 7.5 was done this way, because there were so many customizations. In another project, version 7.5 was ugraded to version 8.0 the same way. This time it was more like the issues you describe; a wish to change things like business units, departments and job codes to better utilize the application. These two projects seemed more like conversions from alien legacy systems than upgrades. There were all the same issues with data cleansing and transformation, and the impact on reporting was huge. The team’s knowledge of both source and target systems was better, however, and it seemed as if it took less time to work through the issues than when the source is completely alien.

Answer3

We just finished upgrading HRMS from version 7.2 to 8.3, and we re-implemented as there really was not a path that would work for us. We had a lot of customizations that we re-looked at, and removed as many as we could during the upgrade. We went through fit gaps  just like our original implementation, and it took us six months from start to finish. I think the system is cleaner than before.

*Questions excerpted from ITToolBox.com*

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