Considerations for an Upgrade
As an organization you have committed to upgrade to JDA WMS 2017+ and are in the process of evaluating the effort required for this upgrade and whether this upgrade can solely be considered a “Technical” upgrade?
Like any organization running pre JDA WMS 2017+ software, a major portion of your customizations will be in the form of DDAs (Data Driven Applications). Pre JDA WMS 2017+, the DDAs provided a quick method of providing your internal customers with customized views of their WMS data, provide simple maintenance screens and even screens to manage specific business rules and conditions. All this was easy in the pre JDA WMS 2017+ world and a significant business process is now vested in this.
When considering the upgrade, this is a daunting undertaking because there is no upgrade path for the DDAs. You are mainly given one choice: that you can continue to run the DDAs in the “Fat” client and make your user population work within two GUI paradigms.
Before getting into the effort required for converting DDAs into Web Framework of 2017+, let us first consider what effort went into the DDA development in the current framework:
- 30% of the effort is in imagining the solution and designing it
- 40% of the effort is around the development of the SQL/ Command that will extract or manage the data for the DDA
- 10% of the effort is in DDA development
- 20% of the effort is in validation, testing and deployment