Guys,

I've been asked a very strange question by my head of service.

And thats to get some 'rough' figures from UK R12 customers, on comparing the price of doing an Upgrade (11.5.10 - R12) versus an R12 implementation. Be it in house or from a supplier.

Is anyone willing to share some numbers with me, but obviously keeping the names etc in confidence.

To be honest, even just some 'X was 10% more expensive than Y' type statements would be good.

Theres an expectation that i can deliver something here!

Cheers,
Gary

Are you wanting to compare an upgrade against the cost of a fresh re-implementation!

I'd have thought that there would not be many UK Payroll R11 customers out there willing to consider a fresh implementation, unless they were thinking of ditching Oracle, or had been taken-over (or merged) and were being forced to re-engineer their processes (including flex structures). Just think of losing all that payroll history...

I've heard of Financial's customers chosing to do a fresh start rather than upgrade - but then finapps are blessed with lots of nice tools to import historic data, and the tables structures are a lot simpler.

At the UK-OUG Conference back in Dec 2008 i saw a presentation by some people from Mokum (i think) - they have done several R12 projects and had indicated that there was an even split between upgrade vs re-implementation. None of the re-implemented sites were HRMS users.

Unless you have a large swathe of customisations, i would have thought that the cost of an upgrade would be less than a re-implementation. The likes of the MoD's and NHS's of this world will also probably consider upgrading, as the cost of the original implementation was so huge that they could not justify doing it all over again!

I can't tell you how much the NHS R12 upgrade project is going to cost, as i am not party to the information (and am bound-over not to tell if i were party to it). However its not insignificant, but a drop in the ocean to the original project cost. A re-implementation was not considered an option.

It would be interesting to know how many UK customers (especially the Payroll-heavy ones) are not considering either option presently. Those that are planning to hold out on R11 until the extended support runs out and hope that they can either soldier-on, or move to another provider.
And how many are also holding out for Fusion Apps?

Baz,
An interesting question, my thoughts would depend on the amount of customisation the customer has had to do in the past to meet the need of the then deficiencies in the application. If this is the case I would re-implement, it works out quicker and in some cases cheaper in the long run.
It also allows the customer to take fully advantage of the new functionality and to get to a 'vanilla' state, as seems to be the trend at the moment.
Payroll I agree is a different issue, especially in the areas which you have outlined.

Andy
By the way I will be joining Mokum shortly

As rightly pointed out by Clive/Andy, we recently did a full cycle implementation from 11.5.9 to R12.1.1 as we bought a company in the US which was on 12.0.3.

The implementation decision was more of politically driven that system/business process driven.

From our experience I think the large chunk of costs are related to consultants than the system/licenses. If you manage/control the project well this can be kept under control.

Consultants costing large chunks of money! Outrageous!

Baz,
We are now under a very different economic climate, and what we should all be doing (contractors and SI's) is providing an effective service to our clients.
As you know we have the talents in the Orcale HCM market space, mainly based in the UK, but which can be depolyed anywhere in the world. Let us keep it like this.
Andy

Andy,

Surely, we always provide an effective service to our clients. I know I do.

Delboy

My comment, although flippant, was intended in jest - it is a common belief (especially in UK) that the bulk of implementation costs appear to be related to 3rd-party implementor costs (be they SI's, Vendors, Management Consultants and genuine independent contractors) rather than software/hardware costs.

In my view, we independent contractors appear to get beaten with the "expensive staff" stick where ever we go. In my experience (especially on larger projects) the incumbent "System Integrator" company will be running the show, flooding the project with its own staff (of all levels of experience) and "preferred" contractors, and "spin" the apparent "effectivness" and "value for money" that they provide. For the lucky few independents who manage to get a contract in these kind of projects they tend to face an uphill battle against the incumbent team and even the client's own staff. We are easily dismissed, and often (unfairly) made scapegoats for failure of others.

I personally believe that we provide an effective, and value-for-money service whatever the size of project, whether its a fresh implementation or an upgrade. If i did not provide an effective service to any of my clients then my contracting life would be extremely short lived. Most of us live and die by our hard-earned, hard fought reputations.

Yes we have to adapt to the changing economic climate, and yes we need to keep abreast of the changing HCM market place.

Maybe now really is time for the oft-discussed collaborative consulting venture to take off

upgrades these days are a lot better than before. I mean, a few pre-requ patches and then a main patch. For one of our clients we did a big upgrade 2 years ago from 11.5.8 to 12.0.2 with a total downtime of 5 days for production (weekend + BH + 2 woking days). We are in the process now of upgrading to 12.1 because of iRec functionality...reimplementation hasn't been an option ever...
Jairo