Best Buy Canada, Ltd (a $5 billion wholly-owned subsidiary of Best Buy Co. Inc.) needed to upgrade their financial systems from Oracle 11i to R12 in order to maintain support as Oracle will be discontinuing support for 11i in December 2015.
Key objectives of the Best Buy Canada Oracle R12 Upgrade project included the following:
- Convert all existing open transactions from 11i to Oracle release 12.1.3
- Upgrade Oracle DB from 10g to 11g
- Purchase and install new hardware while migrating from a Sun Solaris O/S to Linux Redhat
- Eliminate the need to use a third party payment company by utilizing Oracle’s standard payment functionality
OnPlan Consulting was contracted to oversee the upgrade process. OnPlan provided a Project Manager as well as functional consultants to provide guidance over the upgrade. In addition to the OnPlan team, a team of dedicated Best Buy Canada (BBYC) resources was allocated to the project. As the project progressed, it was evident that a large data cleanup effort would need to ensue in order to reach the objectives of BBYC. As a result of multiple custom reports, many data issues had not been addressed as they were no longer being brought to light. The OnPlan team identified these issues and worked with BBYC resources to address the effort. Resolving the open BBYC data issues took a substantial amount of work from the OnPlan team as well as the BBYC team but in the end allowed for a much smoother and cleaner upgrade process. In addition to upgrading the Oracle Financials system, the OnPlan team provided guidance to BBYC personnel with regard to best practices and fully utilizing functionality they currently owned. As a result, BBYC was able to recognize efficiencies and increased functionality without incurring additional costs. OnPlan ultimately completed the Oracle R12 upgrade for BBYC on time and under budget. The collaboration between OnPlan and BBYC was noted by BBYC Senior Management as a key part of the overall success of the upgrade project.
