In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations must continually adapt and optimize their technology environments to stay competitive. For businesses leveraging PeopleSoft as their enterprise software solution, the accumulated customizations over time can lead to increased costs, decreased efficiency, and hindered system upgrades. De-customizing your PeopleSoft environment can help alleviate these challenges, enabling your organization to leverage the full potential of PeopleSoft while reducing complexity and improving maintainability. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of de-customization and outline a strategic approach to successfully de-customize your PeopleSoft environment.
Understanding the Impact of Customizations
Customizations are often implemented to address specific business needs or industry requirements that are not met out-of-the-box by PeopleSoft. While they provide short-term solutions, over time, customizations can result in:
- Increased Costs: Maintaining customizations, particularly during system upgrades, becomes a resource-intensive task. The need for ongoing custom code development, testing, and maintenance can significantly strain your IT resources and budget.
- Reduced Efficiency: Customizations can create complex and convoluted processes within your PeopleSoft environment, leading to decreased efficiency and increased user frustration. Additionally, customizations may not align with new features or functionality introduced in later PeopleSoft versions, limiting your ability to leverage these advancements.
- Upgrade and PUM Update Challenges: Upgrades and even regular PUM updates become complicated and time-consuming when customizations are involved. Upgrading a heavily customized environment requires extensive regression testing, potentially causing delays and increasing the risk of errors affecting critical business processes.
Benefits of De-Customizing
De-customization, or the process of removing or reducing customizations in your PeopleSoft environment, offers several key benefits:
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership: By reducing customizations, you can lower long-term costs associated with ongoing development, testing, and maintenance efforts. With a streamlined environment, system upgrades become simpler and more cost-effective.
- Enhanced Maintainability: De-customizing your PeopleSoft environment translates to a simplified and more maintainable system. This improves your ability to respond to changing business requirements and decreases reliance on scarce technical resources.
- Leveraging New Features: De-customizing allows you to take full advantage of the new features and enhancements delivered in newer versions of PeopleSoft. By aligning with the delivered functionality, your organization can improve efficiency, adopt industry best practices, and leverage PeopleSoft’s continued investment in innovation.
A Strategic Approach to De-Customization
De-customizing your PeopleSoft environment requires careful planning and execution to minimize disruption and ensure a successful outcome. Here are essential steps to guide you through the process:
- Documentation and Analysis: Begin by documenting all existing customizations, their purpose, and the business need they address. Perform a thorough analysis of each customization to determine its ongoing value and alignment with business processes. This analysis will help identify candidates for removal or modification.
- Business Process Review: Engage key stakeholders to review current business processes and assess if customizations are still necessary. Identify process improvements and evaluate if they can be accomplished through delivered functionality or configuration changes.
- Develop a De-Customization Roadmap: Based on the analysis and business process review, create a roadmap that outlines the progressive removal and simplification of customizations. Prioritize based on impact, complexity, and value. Set clear milestones and communicate them across the organization.
- Leverage Configurations: Explore PeopleSoft’s robust delivered configuration capabilities to address the identified business needs wherever possible. Take advantage of delivered features, utilities, personalizations, and user-defined tables to minimize the need for customizations. (Read more about some of these features like Page and Field Configurator).
- Legacy Data Considerations: Determine how to handle data associated with customizations, ensuring its smooth transition or integration into the de-customized environment. Data migration strategies and any potential data transformation efforts should be carefully planned and executed.
- Thorough Testing and Training: Rigorous testing is essential to validate the effectiveness of de-customization efforts. Develop a comprehensive test plan that covers all affected areas and scenarios. Additionally, provide training and support to ensure users are proficient in the new streamlined processes.
Partnering with an Experienced PeopleSoft Partner
Successfully de-customizing your PeopleSoft environment requires expertise, thorough planning, and careful execution. Partnering with an experienced PeopleSoft Partner such as Elire, can greatly facilitate the de-customization process. Elire’s proprietary PeopleSoft Customization Identification tool analyzes and groups existing enhancements into “customization buckets” organized by Component (Business process) to allow for easier review and analysis. More information and a short demo of this tool is available below:
By leveraging Elire’s expertise, organizations can benefit from an accelerated de-customization journey, ensuring efficiency, reducing risks, and achieving maximum value from their PeopleSoft investment.
Conclusion
De-customizing your PeopleSoft environment is a strategic initiative that can yield long-term benefits for your organization. By reducing complexity, lowering costs, and leveraging new features, you position your organization for success in today’s ever-changing business landscape. Follow a systematic approach, engage key stakeholders, and consider partnering with an experienced PeopleSoft consultant to guide you on this journey. Embrace the power of de-customization and unlock the full potential of your PeopleSoft environment.
