Marek Brothers: JDE Upgrade & Private Cloud Migration

About the Client

Originally founded in 1938 as a drywall business, MAREK immediately began shaping the industry with the innovative way they purchased, delivered, and installed drywall in the market. Through their strong industry relationships, they have since diversified as a large company with a variety of product offerings in the commercial and residential markets. From initial project planning and design, to providing the framework for your building and adding finishing touches on paint and trims, MAREK offers services for the duration of your project.

Challenges the Client Faced

After migrating from JD Edwards World to EnterpriseOne years ago, MAREK experienced several issues including random session expiry, stuck batches, extremely long job processing time, reporting issues, and a lack of training.

Consequently, when it was time to upgrade to the latest release of EnterpriseOne, MAREK wanted to ensure they conducted a thorough strategic assessment to ensure that their residual issues from the last upgrade did not occur again. As part of the upgrade evaluation, MAREK wanted to explore improving business processes, taking advantage of functional and technical enhancements, moving to a hosted solution in the cloud, enhancing their
disaster recovery strategy, and other potential benefits. They also lacked documentation from the last migration and wanted to ensure that they documented this upgrade completely.

GSI's Solution

To determine the best upgrade strategy, MAREK partnered with GSI to conduct a strategic Business Value Assessment (BVA). The following options were evaluated as part of the assessment:

1. Remain “status quo” on architecture, applications, and tools release
2. Maintain architecture and application release, upgrade tools release
3. Maintain architecture, upgrade application and tools release to the latest releases
4. Re-platform and/or host; upgrade application and tools release

At the conclusion of the BVA, MAREK decided to upgrade both their application and tools release to the latest version of EnterpriseOne. A comprehensive project plan was put in place and executed by experienced GSI and MAREK project teams. During the upgrade, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, which temporarily halted the upgrade project and led MAREK to decide to move to a private/hosted cloud in the middle of the project and go live in the cloud.  Ultimately, with the help of GSI, MAREK achieved the following:

• Upgraded to latest JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application and tools release
• Moved to private/hosted cloud
• Created an improved disaster recovery plan
• Developed a continuous business process improvement plan
• Enhanced their security (SOD) model
• Ease of “data retrieval”, reporting, and dashboards
• Complete system documentation
• Automation with enhanced monitoring and alerting