RSMUS.comAs featured in the “Fall 2013 AXUG Magazine”, below is a small sample of some of the high-level recommendations from a Partner’s perspective who recently completed an extensive upgrade project migrating from Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 to 2012:
1. Quality Assurance – Above anything, it is imperative that full system and regression testing is completed against not just the migrated customized code, but also business processes against the upgraded data and transactions. Be sure to include the execution of your scheduled batch jobs, inventory close, financial close, etc.
2. Mock Go-Live – Perform several go-live simulations prior to your actual go-live. Ensure that you have a comprehensive checklist of go-live activities that are executed and accounted for, including the financial back-end tie-outs.
3. Upgrade Strategy – Review and determine the data upgrade strategy. This is dependent on your data volumes and how long the business is willing to remain offline during this process. Extremely high transactional volumes or tables with significant amounts of data should be reviewed for truncation depending on the amount of time the data upgrade takes (hardware and DB space also plays a role here).
4. Disk Space – Review the disk space and ensure that you have enough capacity on the respective servers to accommodate the upgrade.
5. Performance Testing/Tuning – Please do not discount the importance of performance testing and tuning. This could vary from AIF integrations to batch processing to standard business process flows. This increases depending on the amount of customizations.
(Seth has published a Microsoft Dynamics AX performance whitepaper, available for download at dynamicserppros.com/axperformancetesting).
