Practice Makes Perfect

If your team could choose how many practices to hold before the championship game to ensure a win, how many would you have?  Are you going to stop at two?  Most teams practice for weeks or even months together to ensure everyone knows their role and the playbook. 

When upgrading your ERP the stakes are high – if you lose it could cost your business both money and customers.  Limiting the number of times you refresh your data and practice the go-live process reduces your chance to get it right.  Project budgets and the cost of technical consulting hours typically limit most projects resulting in most companies only practicing twice before going-live.  Most projects also result in a chaotic first week on the new version and sleepless nights for the IT team!  It no longer needs to be that way. 

 “When we migrated from V7 to V12, The XTECH tool reduced a migration event that could have taken days to mere hours.  When your organization operates within a global, 24-hour setting, speed is critical” – Aric Gamache, VP of Technology

Upgrades don’t have to be constrained to two practices with XTech-Upgrade!  XTech-Upgrade allows Sage X3 clients to repeat the upgrade process as many times as they need to ensure the team is working well together. Sage X3 partner, RKL eSolutions, worked with Yakima Chief Hops to upgrade from Sage X3 v7 to v12.  Since Yakima Chief Hops operations run 24 hours a day any amount of time without Sage X3 would cost the business money.  Using XTech-Upgrade they were able to complete an upgrade project that was not constrained by go-live time or number of practices with successful results. 

No project is perfect, but the ability for Yakima Chief Hops team to practice the process without impacting production eliminated the normal go-live hiccups. 

John Arney, Business Systems Manager described XTech-Upgrade as the “gold standard around which X3 migrations should be built. We will never do another migration without this tool…period.” 

The new methodology, which gives clients control over refreshing the data, gave Yakima Chief Hops the best possible go-live experience by front-loading the project efforts.  Instead of finding issues at the last minute, Yakima Chief Hops go-live was only a few hours. 

  “XTECH enabled a smooth transition from version to version, allowing maximum time for data scrubbing, field preparation and end user-training.  It mimics the go-live process, exposing errors and allowing technical teams to formulate an accurate scope, evaluate data and practice the implementation from start to finish. The hours that our IT team saved were instead spent preparing for the migration.”   

Learn more about how your Sage X3 upgrade can be a success with RKL eSolutions and XTech-Upgrade. You can contact RKL eSolutions at contact@rklesolutions.com or visit their website at RKL eSolutions.com

Benefits of Upgrading Your ERP with XTech-Upgrades

Looking to upgrade your Sage X3 ERP? Currently Sage X3 standard upgrade processes includes a number of calculations and transformations of the data to convert to the newest version v12.  But this might not be enough preparation for your company and for some Sage X3 clients this can mean even more down time to the business. We have seen a lot of clients stay on old versions like v5 and v6 which are no longer supported, because of this risk. That’s where XTech-Upgrade comes in!

XTech-Upgrade by X-Techarts makes an upgrade of a large database possible with significantly smaller down time.  The methodology applied shifts the majority of the transformation to the first extraction. While an upgrade to the folder is running in the new v12 environment; normal business continues in the current version of Sage X3.  After that first extraction, only the records that have changed have to go through the upgrade process again.  That means instead of trying to convert 4 years of data in one weekend, the go-live is only dealing with a week or a few weeks of data and the result means the upgrade down-time is counted in HOURS instead of days. 

Extraction from a live folder that only took 3 hours

J&P Park Acquisitions, Inc. (aka Park Seed) is a Sage X3 client who recently upgraded from Sage X3 v6 to v12 with the help of RKL eSolutions and XTech-Upgrade.  They were so behind on their upgrades that their database size had grown to 450 GB.  With a traditional Sage X3 upgrade, it would have taken around 10 days for X3 to process all the updates.  Who can afford to stop their ERP for 10 days?  So for them, this was never an option and had discouraged them from attempting an upgrade.  RKL introduced XTech-Upgrade as part of the upgrade proposal and the end result was Park Seed going live with v12 in a single day. 

Amy Powell, Cheif Technology Officer at Park Seed said “The XTech-Upgrade tool was the cornerstone of our sucessful upgrade from Sage V6 to Sage V12. I firmly beleve that we would not have been able to cvomplete this upgrade without it due to the size of our database. Additionally, being able to do many, many test ‘go-lives’ along the way was absolutely key to being able to work out go-live kinks that would have caused us serious problems.”

RKL introduced the XTech-Upgrade methodology where go-live is something that is practiced and done multiple times leading up to the actual go-live weekend.  This allowed Park Seed to fine tune the database for the best possible performance, manage the years of customizations to ensure they were all working correctly, and ensure integrations were ready.  With 450 GB of data a lot could go wrong and it is important to choose the partners and technology that is ready to handle it. 

Amy elaborated, the XTech-Upgrade tool gave Park Seed “fresh, up-to-date data at every step of the process.  We were able to test the go-live process end-to-end multiple times along the way and to test the fixes and changes to the data model in near real time.  I can honestly say that this tool eliminated the normally inevitable go-live surprises that happen.”

This client is just one example of a smooth transition to Sage X3 v12 that is possible with XTech-Upgrade and a Sage X3 partner, like RKL eSolutions, who understands how to leverage a methodology of synchronization and practice which allows an upgrade to go smoothly. 

Learn more about XTech-Upgrade, how it can make your move to Sage X3 v12 smoother and all it has to offer by contacting RKL eSolutions at contact@rklesolutions.com or visit their website at RKL eSolutions.com

Time to Upgrade?

Mitigate risk and upgrade your ERP. This is not impossible! The first step is to trust and empower the users. It is important to help define what to do in the new version for testing and offer new functionality to improve the business as motivation for the extra work. If the users are on the system, safely trying the new version with purposeful testing, they will be able to smoothly adopt new features and functionality. If the users are participating, they will help find any issues before the day of go live.
XTech-Upgrade allows you to refresh Sage X3 v12 with the live data in your current Sage X3 version. Imagine the quality of testing users can do if every Monday morning your new v12 matches your current X3 version in data. Now you can easily answer the age old question “what do I test?“ by letting users run the business in parallel in the system for short amounts of time. I find most users want to help and want to test, but this can be very difficult for them when their data is weeks old. Run in parallel for a few days to cover the normal business needs. Then enable the users to go try anything new they run across during the rest of the week.