It is essential that changes to the E-Business Suite are controlled effectively but traditional methods, such as manually documenting all changes prior to applying them and then manually repeating the changes in multiple environments, are both time consuming and prone to human error.
Difficulty in reviewing complex changes in a static document as setup can often span many pages and is often laid out in a format that makes checking or analysis difficult.
Setup must be manually entered in each target environment and there is no easy way to subsequently compare the entered setup for accuracy against the manual plan document.
When environments become out of sync, for whatever reason, the specific actions required to realign them will not generally reflect existing documentation. After analysis of where the environments differ fresh planning documentation is required to define the specific changes that must be made.
ConfigSnapshot allows organisations to streamline the process for planning new and changed configuration as well as simplifying deployment across many environments.
For simple changes it is not necessary to manually document the changes prior to making them to an environment. ConfigSnapshot enables you to capture the existing setup data prior to making the change and then, once the change has been completed, to automatically document the changes made, removing the need for duplication.
ConfigSnapshot includes a flexible planning area that enables you to define and review setup data before it is entered or amended in the E-Business Suite. Data can either be manually entered into the plan or existing data can be selectively extracted from an environment and, where necessary, modified or transformed in the plan. Simple download/upload integration with Excel allows users to also maintain plan data in a familiar spreadsheet layout.
Reporting ConfigSnapshot plans is as flexible as reporting against environment data, meaning the planned configuration can be thoroughly checked for consistency and completeness prior to deploying it to the E-Business Suite environment.
Plans can also include details of any actions other than standard configuration set up that should be carried out, e.g. submitting a concurrent process or executing a script. This ensures the plan to comprehensively reflect all required steps allowing all planned activities to be maintained in a single location, minimising the risk of actions not being completed.
Once planned configuration has been verified it can be organised to define the order in which setup should be carried out in the target environment and any detailed instructions that should be followed during set up can be included. For most areas it is possible to automatically load configuration from the plan into the E-Business Suite environment rather than manually re-keying data.
Once configuration has been entered in the target environment it can be directly compared against the plan to ensure all setup was completed correctly.
"We used ConfigSnapshot as part of the integration of two R12 instances as part of a merger and it proved to be a valuable tool throughout the project. The ability to quickly document and compare between multiples instances was central to ensuring the project progressed on schedule through to Go-Live - despite the substantial levels of new configuration required. On completion of the project, we were also able to very quickly produce the required documentation for auditors of all configuration changes made - saving significant amounts of time. We would definitely recommend the product."