Property Management Conversion Question???

Hi!

We have a project here to convert from an old mainframe system to JDE One World XE, the Property Management module. Make a conversion to module G15. A lot of people are telling me not to go ahead with this conversion and let the users enter all the information manually as I may hit the wall at full speed. I doubt this but unfortunately, I don't have a lot of experience with this module.

Is there any folks who did a MAJOR conversion within this module and want to share his views/comments/experience with me in order to help me in my decision to go ahead????

Any comments will be welcome.

Thanks,

Eric Faubert

I had a client that did this implementation before I came on board with
them.. they had the same situation of mainframe to JDE and they did manually
enter everything... they said it would be easier with the set up to enter it
then try to figure out the conversions and such... and they have over 3000
stores in the US alone... so it wasn't a small implementation. thanks,
Bobby



We have a project here to convert from an old mainframe system to JDE One
World XE, the Property Management module. Make a conversion to module G15. A
lot of people are telling me not to go ahead with this conversion and let
the users enter all the information manually as I may hit the wall at full
speed. I doubt this but unfortunately, I don't have a lot of experience with
this module.

Is there any folks who did a MAJOR conversion within this module and want
to share his views/comments/experience with me in order to help me in my
decision to go ahead????

Any comments will be welcome.

Thanks,

Eric Faubert

Eric,

Do you have more specific question, since I don't see a problem to upgrade from your old system to OneWorld for the property management module.

Maybe time and/or ressources is a constraint for you and that's why somebody sugested to do it manually, but even it that case your will need tons of ressources to re-enter all the info. I really think that every implementation is a wall that you hit and that you shoud climb, so we did !

Look Eric, give us more info (context, size of implementation, time constraint, ressources, etc..) and it will be easier to answer.

Christian Audet

Hi Christian,

Thanks for your comments. To give you more details, we have about the same numbers of tenants(close to 4000) and a couple of millions of records. My time frame is Jan 1, 2003 and I should have a technical ressource with experience full-time on this conversion. Some consultants in property management with JDE, are telling me they know some business who tried to convert a legacy system
to JDE without success and they had to go back to the original plan to enter the information manually. The main reason they tell me it's because no 'Z' files exist in the module and the relation between the G15 files are complicated.
Which is the reason I'm trying to get the feedback from folks with experience on this module. Also, because no 'Z' files exist in this module.

Again, any comments/recommendations will be helpful.

Thanks,

Eric Faubert

Eric,

It really depend on the time and ressource you have, I hate to say that everything is possible, but that is still true ! We are actually doing it and WE WILL BE LIVE (PM and Financial) and failure is not a option of course. As you know already they is no 'Z' file in system 15, that mean you need to hard code everything. Then my next question is: how many developpers you plan to put on this and how many months ?

Christian Audet

Eric,

I would have to agree with Christian's assessment...
It would difficult at best to convert your entire data
set into JDE. However, you should be able to convert
pieces of information. Your AR and AP data is
convertable as long as you link the information to a
lease number. That means you need to establish your
leases in JDE before your actual conversion and create
a cross reference table to add the data items
necessary to create the links from property management
to the other systems.

It will be implausible to attempt to map the master
lease data as there are many tables involved (business
units, building, floor, unit data, UDC's, master
lease, rents, CAM's, etc.) You can have your
staff/team begin entry of the base data to create the
lease master with a cutoff for conversion testing
(usually 2-3 weeks) before go live.
--- fauberte <[email protected]> wrote:
http://www.jdelist.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=OW&Number=40232


__________________________________________________


World, OW B733X and Xe

We converted all of our legacy system's property management data using scripts developed in-house. We heard similar arguments from our consulting partner and JDE about doing a manual conversion. JDE's policy is that any data manipulation outside of JDE tools is "not supported". We simply ignored this as a policy created by idiots (esp. since XE has no PM conversion tools).
We determined that a manual conversion was impossible given our resources. It would have added 40%-50% of the cost of our implementation before you factor in the cost of correcting keying errors that would be the sure result a manual load.
But on the other hand we did limit the data we loaded to minimize the chance for problems. We did not load tenant billing history from the legacy system. This would have been extremely complex as we have had to account for the differences in how JDE and the legacy system track charges, late fees, etc. So all we converted were actual lease details, revenue schedules, and outstanding charges as of the date of conversion. Also note we were doing a complete system flip so we were converting our G/L, A/P, etc. at the same time.
We used Delphi to write conversion programs to accomplish this. We simply read in the data from the legacy Informix database and wrote directly to the JDE tables in Oracle. This means your firm would require on-staff programing assistance (someone that knows SQL) and decent CNC help to decode debug logs, etc. Another thing that did help us was that our developers were sent to JDE training. Though in reference to the data conversion this only really helped when we had to run JDE's trace utility.
We did have problems as you might expect. Some issues were related to the alien way in which JDE stores data. For example the JDE Julian date format versus native DB data data types. Also JDE tends to use a single space in a string field as a {null}. The real issues were correctly mapping field and data relationships in the various JDE tables. What helped here was manually loading sample data into one environment to determine what tables were being hit.
Ultimately we got 98% of the data we needed loaded. Some editing of the loaded data was required at times. We also encountered inconsistencies runing various applications. The most annoying of these were when an application or UBE would work for one group of tenants but not another. But ultimately these problems were traced and fixed. The only real failure was that do to time pressures some of open rent charges had to be loaded manually as our conversion application loaded data that JDE could not read. In general we were quite happy w/ the result esp. compared to the amount of work that would have been required to manually load everything.

nickc,

Thank you for this reply to help Eric, that's very nive from you to share that with us. When I read you eMail I understant that you are now LIVE is that right ? Do you mind to give us some detail about the size of the conversion and the time frame that it took you?

Christian Audet

I am really glad that I read the discouraging posts on conversion NOW THAT WE ARE BASICALLY DONE ! Not only are we converting property management (about 7500 tenants), including AR, from two separate legacy systems, but we have already converted G/L and A/P to OneWorld at the same time two companies merged together. On top of that, before we go live with prop. management conversion, we are upgrading next week to ERP 8 !

Yes we mapped the lease master, units, floors, business units, etc. We are doing the AR billing history for at least one full calendary year. That is at least 235,000 records. As far as the open item, we loaded just the non-zero invoices on file, not all the invoice history. That is about 9,000 records. We will keep the legacy system running for a while so we can see the history.


Manual entry is only for small conversions.

Christian is on the right track here!


cheers
Sheen

I have converted 3 clients of various sizes:
1000 properties
20,000 properties
3000 properties
from their legacy systems into OneWorld XE. Primarily it comes down to a mapping exercise and using the logging capablilites in JDE to determine the actual tables being updated. In property I loaded properties (F0006), floors (F1506), units (F1507) and their areas (F1514). In addtion we had leases, both receivable and payables. These tables include the lease header (F1501B), lease detail (F15017) and recurring billing (F1502B). We also used log classes (F1521) to hold extra information about a property. I had a UBE developed to input the text attachments to the log classes from a text file.

I used MS Access as my conversion tool, as it gives me full access to our Oracle database and it provided a good holding area to for the conversion data.

I hope this gives you confidence to go ahead but I cannot over emphasise the importance of mapping and understanding the system before proceeding down this path