Quest had the opportunity to speak with Darrell Hawkes, Manager of Business Systems at Turner Industries Group, about the company’s migration from JD Edwards World to EnterpriseOne.

Turner Industries migrated from JD Edwards World A9.4 to EnterpriseOne 9.2 in 18 months. The company debated moving from World to EnterpriseOne for a long time, but they ultimately decided to take the leap!

About Turner Industries Group

Turner Industries is a single vendor solution in heavy industrial construction, pipe, module and vessel fabrication, equipment, rigging, heavy hauling, and associated specialty services. The business is privately owned by the Turner family and has been in business for over 56 years. The company’s global headquarters is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Turner’s JD Edwards footprint consists of HCM, Financials, Manufacturing, Fixed Assets, Job Costs, CAM, ETO and Project Manufacturing.

Turner remained on the IBM i-Series during the migration. This enabled them to continue using some RPG custom programs, which reduced retraining and development time. BI Publisher was implemented which enabled them to eliminate a few third-party solutions.

Visit Turner Industries’ Website

What made you decide to move from JD Edwards World to EnterpriseOne?

There were several factors that contributed to the decision. Our list included:

• EnterpriseOne is the flagship product, and Oracle is investing more in it than in World.
• Oracle Premier Support for EnterpriseOne had a longer timeframe than World.
• It was difficult to find RPG programmers. Increasing difficult to find technical and Business Systems staff with JDE World experience.
• EnterpriseOne has a more modern user interface. We talked with millennials at the office and EnterpriseOne was more attractive to the younger workforce.
• There were additional capabilities in EnterpriseOne, like ETO/Project Manufacturing.
• Core functionality reduced the number of customizations and bolt-on applications
• We wanted to keep up with technology.
• There was a desire to capture the knowledge of key resources with long Turner tenure.

Did you face any challenges during the transition?

There were several. One was that the payroll system and the Fabrication/Manufacturing application had a lot of customizations. The Fabrication business was the most important, so a prototype was done first to prove the capability in EnterpriseOne. The prototype was a success, so we moved forward with the project.

We also had thousands of World Writer, Dream Writer and FASTR reports. We implemented Reports Now and are building One View reports. There were some upgrade challenges with Payroll and the Pipe Fabrication conversion, but we worked through the issues with CSS and Oracle support. CSS provided CNC support and trained the RPG programmers on EnterpriseOne.

Have you noticed any benefits after moving to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne?

We’ve seen tremendous benefits! Users have much greater access to their data, they have configurable grids and full-table field visibility. EnterpriseOne pages are also more descriptive, and the features are easy to use.

We had over 3,000 modified objects in World, so our goal was to use the standard EnterpriseOne processes and be as vanilla as possible. We were able to minimize our customizations in EnterpriseOne.

What advice do you have for others wanting to make the switch?

Know and use the three C’s: Communication, collaboration and cooperation. Our project was well-planned and tightly controlled, but there was also honest and open feedback throughout the entire thing.

What is the next move for Turner Industries?

We will be looking at Café One and to implement more Watchlists. We plan to stay code current and take application updates once a year and tools updates more often. Leverage new Work Order functionality for our Specialty and Scaffolding groups.