Retire Your E-Business Suite Data in Style with APEX

The Situation

Oracle E-Business Suite is an old friend. I have been implementing and extending EBS since 1994 (think version 9.4 character mode). There comes a time, however, when we need to move onto the next big thing. If only it was as easy to move to the next ERP as it is to upgrade your iPhone. If you have made the decision to move to Oracle ERP Cloud but are wondering what to do with the years and years of accumulated EBS data, then this post is for you. With APEX and some EBS know how, there is an affordable way to sunset your EBS environment without having to either convert all of the data or maintain your old EBS environment for the next 5-10 years.

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The Problem

The problem is that in many cases you are legally required to keep your ERP data for many years (100 years if you are into Nuclear Energy!). One option is to keep EBS up and running in view only mode. Maintaining the hardware to keep the full EBS stack up and running, however, is not cheap. When you add the cost of keeping it patched and secure you end up with pretty much the same headache you were trying to get rid of by going to the cloud in the first place. Just shifting all this software to AWS or Oracle IaaS really doesn't help much either.
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Implementers will convert your data to ERP Cloud for you but this can get expensive quickly. The more years of data you have and the more complex the data you are migrating, the bigger the bill. If you are converting anything more than the legally required number of years of General Ledger, your master data and any high volume open transactions then the chances are you are paying more than you need to. If you can reduce the amount and types of data you have to move to ERP Cloud you can reduce the implementation bill significantly. No matter what data you are able to convert, however, the chances are you will still be required to retain much of your EBS data for at least 5-10 years.

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The Solution (APEX to the Rescue)

We were recently given this challenge by a customer. They had a legacy EBS R11.5.10 environment they had inherited during an acquisition. The data had long since been converted to their corporate EBS R12 environment but they had to keep the old environment open for audit purposes. It was running on aging Sun Hardware and was becoming increasingly challenging to manage.
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We proposed migrating just the database to a much smaller Linux Server and putting an APEX front end on it. Not only does this solve the problem of maintainability and cost, it also gives users a modern easy to use UI to work with.

Now that this is up and running and the old hardware retired, the next step is to move just the tables they need to a PaaS cloud service. We are thinking we can squeeze this into something like Exadata Express ($175/month for 20GB). That a big step down from maintaining a full EBS environment for something that is accessed a dozen or so times a year.

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Why APEX?

I believe APEX is uniquely suited to solving this problem:

1. It runs off an Oracle database (which you have anyway)
2. All it needs to run (aside from the database) is ORDS which, when run in standalone mode offers a tiny footprint when compared to the full EBS stack.
3. The data and APEX application can be easily moved to a cloud service (such as Exadata Express).
4. APEX offers an easy to use and powerful reporting capability with build in advanced end user features such as Aggregation, Grouping, Charting, Filtering, Pivoting etc. All based on a simple SQL statement.
5. APEX allows you to integrate various security models so users could login using their current Active Directory credentials.

Sneak Peek

I'll leave you with a sneak peak of what we built. The application was built using the latest version of APEX (as of time of writing 5.1.2). It handles the various EBS organization constructs, Operating Units, Legal Entities, Ledgers, Inventory Organizations etc.