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| Case Study |
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Critical Baan Service Pack upgrade helps
global leader stabilize production environment |
By partnering with
Patni, a leading company in the aerospace domain successfully
pulled off a challenging Baan Service Pack upgrade project.
The Client
The client is a global technology leader specializing in the
advanced materials aerospace domain.
The Challenge
The customer has a centralized data center in USA which hosts
the Baan ERP application. This application is accessed by the
client's manufacturing plants across US, UK and Europe. However,
the application could not be leveraged to its full potential
as the client was unable to update the application regularly
with standard software patches or Service packs. Regular updates
of the application were hampered due to the following challenges:
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High customization of the Baan application made the
process of undertaking an upgrade project to the latest
Service pack version, expensive and time consuming |
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Huge dependency on the Baan application made it difficult
to implement a new Service pack without impacting business.
It was difficult to find a downtime window due to the
global usage of the instance |
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Limited available documentation of the customizations
done. |
As this application was not updated regularly with standard
software patches or Service Packs (SP), the production environment
was unstable. Accordingly, the client sought the services of
Patni to update the application with the latest service packs.
The Solution
Patni did a quick assessment of the existing Baan environment
to understand the client's business processes and customizations.
A detailed report of the impacted Baan components was generated
and a plan was prepared for patching and testing. To help the
client achieve its objective, Patni proposed an aggressive schedule
wherein the project would be rolled out quickly using an onsite-offshore
model.
At the offshore location, functional consultants from Patni
prepared detailed test plans for end-to-end testing of Baan,
which included the client's specific processes and customizations.
Consequently, preliminary production service pack upgrade plans
were drawn based on the inputs from development server setup
and service pack upgrade. Based on the inputs from the functional
consultants, a team of developers completed the patching of
all the customized Baan objects. Subsequently, test plans prepared
by the functional consultants were used to carry out testing
of the patched objects.
With the delivery of test plans and patched objects, the onsite
phase of the project started as planned. The preliminary SP
upgrade plan was tested and refined by upgrading the client's
test environment from SP6 to SP16+. After all the patched and
customized Baan objects were installed on the test box, the
environment was released for a rigorous one month User Acceptance
Testing. Additionally, a detailed go live plan was put to test
by doing a dry run on a separate environment. Learnings from
the test were captured and used to refine the plan to fit the
weekend downtime window available. After receiving a sign off
from the users, the production system was successfully upgraded
to SP16+ within the available downtime window.
The Technology
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Baan. |
The Benefits
By partnering with Patni, the client established a stable production
environment with zero downtime within budget. Other significant
benefits include:
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Major cost savings due to effective usage of offshore-onsite
development model |
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Reusable detailed test plans available for all future
projects requiring end to end testing of Baan environment. |
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