Major Upgrade Services

There may be more than one reason that your company will find itself needing to move to the next major release of your enterprise system. You may want the new features to address strategic needs; or you may need to upgrade to retain maintenance support from the vendor. Installing a major upgrade is a significant project, usually including functional work on top of the necessary technical work. The upgrade project involves multiple organizations, and requires good project management to be well controlled.

At DSI, we divide up the work of a major upgrade into 9 areas:

  1. Planning
  2. Fit/Gap analysis
  3. Technical upgrade
  4. Retrofitting customizations
  5. Functional implementation
  6. Testing
  7. Going live
  8. Post-implementation support
  9. Technical support (throughout the project)

Some areas are primarily functional, some are primarily technical. For a given company, some are functions it wants to outsource, some it wants to keep in-house, and some are to be assigned to the most effective resource.

DSI can provide you with onsite resources or a fixed-fee solution for your major upgrade needs.

DSI also has a unique “Virtual Lab” approach available for handling the bulk of (3) Technical Upgrade and (4) Retrofitting Customizations. These are activities for which we provide a lower-cost, better-controlled remote solution, allowing our upgrade specialist to complete these steps on your hardware, working remotely from our Walled Lake, Michigan site. These are normally combined in a fixed-price manner with traditional staffing resources to provide an integrated, cost-effective solution.

The benefits of this approach:

  • Fixed pricing for the bulk of the technical upgrade
  • Not one, but multiple upgrade experts available
  • DSI project management included for all the remote activities
  • Flexibility to temporarily add resources from our talent pool
  • Minimal travel or lodging expense

When using our Virtual Lab approach, we adhere to the principle of effective communications. All remote work is done against a project plan, which is updated continuously and available to you. You receive weekly status reports, and we hold weekly (or more frequent) conference calls to keep all activities synchronized and on schedule.

While we describe this as a “remote delivery” approach, there are some parts of the project where work will be done on-site. We are onsite during the planning phase and for the actual “go-live” weekend. Also, most functional work, such as (5) Functional Implementation and (6) Testing, may be performed on-site.