Siebel 8.0 Upgrade , Siebel Consulting

Upgrade to Siebel 8: In today‘s demanding business environment, lead or you fall behind. Oracle‘s Siebel CRM 8.0 was designed for the rapid pace of change, so you can capitalize on the best opportunities for growth while ensuring maximum satisfaction levels for your customers. Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables organizations to transform the customer experience. With solutions tailored to more than 20 industries, Siebel delivers comprehensive CRM capabilities, tailored industry solutions and role-based customer intelligence.

Siebel CRM 8.0 enables authorized users to create their own work sequences: They can organize their tasks using a step-by-step, codeless process designer that employs a wizard-like sequence common to many desktop and Web 2.0 applications. For example, if you discover a more efficient way to enter data in an account application process, you can easily create a new process. The revised task can then be deployed to an individual team or an entire organization- without calling IT. Business-rules innovation-Siebel CRM 8.0 takes user empowerment to the next level with the addition of a simple-to-use rules engine that enables no technical users to author and manage sophisticated business rules. Rules are the underlying logic-"if this, do that"-that enable the application to successfully enforce key business processes and compliance initiatives. Business analysts can reconfigure business processes in real time to make them more efficient-without IT coding or complex scripting Increased user productivity at lower cost-Two-way synchronization between Siebel CRM 8.0 and familiar Microsoft tools such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint increases user productivity and decreases training costs. Siebel Release 8.0 The most complete, easy-to-use, and technologically advanced CRM suite ever shipped, Siebel CRM 8.0 leverages the entire Oracle technology stack to bring value to your critical end-to-end business processes

Empowering Users:Business Processes - Siebel 8.0 features a new task-based user interface that employs a wizard-like sequence common to many desktop and Web 2.0 applications to speed problem solving and ensure adoption across the enterprise Business Rules - Siebel CRM 8.0 takes user empowerment to the next level with the addition of a simple-to-use, natural language rules engine o Decision Support - Siebel CRM 8.0's embedded real-time decisioning uses real-time, predictive analytics to enable your employees to make real-time customer focused decisions that produce better results.

Enabling Responsiveness:Deployment with zero downtime Siebel's new Application Development Manager enables administrators to deploy product enhancements on the fly-with zero downtime Increased user productivity at lower cost Two-way synchronization between Siebel CRM 8.0 and familiar Microsoft tools such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint increases user productivity and decreases training costs Cross-channel CRM functionality Broad Web services support that makes it easy to extend CRM functionality across the enterprise, to reach all your customer interaction channels as well as connect with other business functions Full Oracle Fusion Middleware support Siebel CRM 8.0 enables you to connect seamlessly to the rich set of enterprise services offered by Oracle Fusion Middleware, such as integration, search and identity management.

What´s new in when you upgrade to Siebel 8:

Upgrades your existing schema to the latest Siebel schema. In place and mostly additive upgrade
New tables, indexes and columns added.
Where needed data moved from old tables to new tables.
Merges your Siebel Tools customizations with the latest Siebel version. Customized repository merged with prior and current Siebel OOTB repositories to produce new customized repository. Only OOTB objects get three-way merged but all objects including totally custom objects can be changed in the upgrade process.

Let Unbounded Solutions plan your successful upgrade to Siebel 8.0:Analyze upgrade requirements. Plan the upgrade Do a proof of concept upgrade Upgrade a copy of production Do practice production runs until results are repeatable Help you with our experience in prior upgrades in Siebel 8.0 Assign just the required resources for the upgrade.

High Level Siebel Upgrade Phases:Upgrade planning and assessment Install new Siebel version and optionally acquire new hardware Development upgrade, testing and fixing QA upgrade and testing Optional upgrade tuning and downtime minimization Train users on new system Production upgrade and deployment.

Estimating Upgrade Projects :Two main factors will play when upgrading your application Complexity of upgrade (customization) Organizational ability to execute: 10 to 1 differences

So How Long Will My Siebel 8.0 Upgrade Take?It depends mainly on how complex or customized is your Siebel application. There are technical and other challenges you will face and the ability of you and your organization to deal with these challenges. It also depends on what your upgrade goals and objectives are and what other tasks beyond a pure technical upgrade are to be accomplished within the upgrade project. Safe to say your upgrade can not be accomplished in less than four (4) months unless it is a special simple case. Any estimate less than four months is impossible due to the Siebel 8 upgrade requirements itself.

What changes during the Upgrade?Upgrades your database to Siebel 8.0. Merges your Tools configuration changes with version 8.0 Siebel to produce a customized version of the Siebel 8.0 application. A Siebel 8 upgrade is definitely not just a MR patch. Different from your original implementation in that you want to skip analysis, design and construction, now instead plan, upgrade and fix.

Dev Upgrade According to the 8.0 Siebel Database Upgrade Guide:

Upgrade the Servers
Upgrade Third Party Software
Upgrade RDBMS
Pre-Upgrade Tasks for the Database
Pre-Upgrade Tasks for DB2 / Oracle / SQLServe
Pre-Upgrade Tasks for Application Data
Preparing Developer‘s for the Upgrade
Upgrade the Database Schema (upgrep)
Prepare for Repository Merge?
Repository Merge
Upgrade Custom Database Schema (upgphys)
Initialize and Extract Developer‘s Local Databases
Review the User Interface
Postmerge Development Tasks
Upgrade Tasks for File System and Database
Postupgrade Tasks for Application Configuration
System Tests
Prepare for Transition to Production Test (QA)

Selectively Going Back To OOTB and New Free Features:Actual examples where OOTB features replaced customizations: o Replaced eScript Audit trail with Siebel audit trail. o Replaced complex 35k line eScript assignment manager with Siebel 7.8 Assignment Manager (20% of upgrade budget). o Compare to features like 7.7+ native browser back/forward buttons, screen homepages, automatic saving of file attachments and others that come for free with the new Siebel version.During planning when you look for opportunities to return to OOTB don‘t be surprised when you can‘t identify tons of places where you can actually remove your customizations - but you should find some.

Development Upgrade Expectations:Application probably won‘t launch after upgrade due to one or more configuration errors which will have to be fixed. Extensively modified OOTB applets will be mangled. Screen/view layout will require touchups. BusComp links and joins will require fixes. SQL errors will be seen until buscomps/tables are straightened out. Scripting may require changes even on Siebel 7 -> 8.0 upgrades. EIM tables may have new required columns and old IF tables don‘t exist anymore. Integration objects might have different XML schemas until they are touched up. Actuate reports will need to be recompiled but custom Actuate VB can require a lot more work. Most existing customers don‘t like 7.7-8.0 removal of page tabs from main screen list views (aggregate view require drilldowns to see tabs)

Other Tasks To Consider Implementing new modules like 7.8 Order Management can be a very large project in itself. Migration from Siebel 6.x or SEA to SIA requires two steps. Pick the right version. 7.8 or 8.0? Migrate to new ST eScript engine or stay with old T engine? Migrate database to UNICODE? Migrate to UTC date / times? Change database vendors?

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