Oracle R12 Upgrade - Estimated Downtime

Question

We are midsize company upgrading from Oracle Financials R11i (11.5.9) to R12. Our consulting vendor performing the upgrade has estimated 8 days to complete the upgrade. Our DB size is less than 150gb and we have a very vanilla environment (only 14 CEMLI's).
Having managed extremely complex SAP upgrades in the past, cutting over during long weekends and thus maximum downtimes of 72hrs I am blown away by an estimated 8 days of downtime in this case.
Does anyone have any experience with this type of upgrade and the expected downtime windows to be incurred by the business?

Answer 1

Hi,
8 calendar days of downtime seems an excessive estimate for the what you've described, though of course there are a lot of factors that influence this. You'll have a much better idea of what to expect once you've performed a dry run (or five :-) ) on a test system. Has the consulting vendor offered any sort of justification for the estimate? That is, are they pointing to anything in your environment that makes this upgrade particularly long? What sort of hardware are you using? Are you migrating to a new platform during this upgrade? Does all of the work they're estimating for truly need to be done during the outage window, or is there some that can be done before or after? What does their estimate look like if you only convert some Financials data during the upgrade, and do the rest post-upgrade?
I can only offer the following data point, though I suspect that there are others on this forum with more varied R12 upgrade experience:
Our upgrade (11.5.10.2->12.0.3) was for a system with a similar data footprint (slightly smaller, in fact), and similarly vanilla environment (customizations limited to reports). We were running on mid-range hardware (two-node system, 2-CPU db server, single-CPU app server). We started our upgrade on a Friday at 6 PM, and finished sometime late the following Sunday evening...less than 72 hours. Granted, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison: you're starting at 11.5.9, not 11.5.10.2. Then again, I assume you'll also be going directly to 12.0.4. We had to add time to our upgrade to apply the 12.0->12.0.3 upgrade driver.
If we were discussing this over a beer, I'd be tempted to claim there's some [Scotty Factor|http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ScottyFactor|Beam me up!] going on here. Since this is a public forum, however, I would never be so woefully unprofessional, and merely suggest that you request clarification from your vendor on the justification for their estimate. :-)
Regards,
John P.
[http://only4left.jpiwowar.com|http://only4left.jpiwowar.com|Shameless plug for my low-volume blog]