City of Westminster - JD Edwards Upgrade

About the Client

Located just northwest of Denver, Westminster was founded in 1859 when settlers migrated to the area after gold was discovered nearby in the South Platte River Valley. Later, the city was incorporated in 1911. Today, the City of Westminster has grown to a population of approximately 110,000 and has over 1,600 employees. As a technologically advanced municipality, Westminster has consistently won the Center for Digital Government’s “Digital City Top 10 Award” for top practices in the public-sector for information and communication technology. In fact they have won this award twelve out of the last thirteen years! Not surprisingly, Westminster is a major user of Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP solution, using Financials, HCM/Payroll and Purchasing. In fact all 1,600 employees use the system to input their time twice a month.

Challenges the Client Faced

As part of their upgrade strategy, Westminster wanted to upgrade to the latest tools release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to leverage the full functionality of EnterpriseOne (E1) Pages. As part of this plan, they decided on doing a full uplift, which included not only an upgrade to the latest tools release of JD Edwards but also upgrading various third party components. Major challenges included the need to transition off of an outdated version of IBM Portal Software which would make future upgrades easier, setting up a new IBM WebSphere web server cluster as well as the need to implement Everest Single Sign On (SSO) Software. Before moving forward, Westminster needed to identify a partner to assist them with their upgrade plan. After evaluating several vendors, Westminster decided to move forward with GSI, Inc. based on being well known in the community, their extensive experience, high recommendations from the Rocky Mountain User Group (RMUG), and knowledge of GSI from the Collaborate user conference.

GSI's Solution

Westminster started their planning process for the upgrade in February, and then sent out an RFQ to prospective partners. They met with GSI in May who provided a clear methodology for the upgrade as well as various options. After deciding to move forward with GSI, the upgrade started in mid-June and finished in mid-August with the project finishing on time and on budget. Larry Garlick, Lead Software Engineer with the City of Westminster was very pleased with the results achieved by GSI. “We were most impressed with GSI’s extensive internal resources in all areas and how smooth the upgrade process went especially with so many complexities. We ran into issues with WebSphere and Server Manager and GSI was immediately able to provide expert resources to quickly resolve these issues. We started on June 4 and were finished on August 14. We needed a partner that would lead the upgrade and GSI certainly delivered on time and on budget. GSI also provided local resources on-site for their go-live.”