The Challenge:

Any E-Business Suite or Cloud Applications implementation consists of several environments. It is crucial that these are managed to ensure changes are correctly and efficiently deployed. As the number of environments increases so does the complexity of managing them.

This does not mean that all environments should be identical. Certain setups reflect the specific environment they are associated with, some may yet to be deployed and some may have been created for specific test scenarios and no longer be required. It is important to be able to quickly identify any differences that exist between environments and ensure these are expected and, where they are not, be able to address them.

Where an implementation includes multiple entities, such as operating / business units or ledgers, many setups should be consistent across them – but there will also be differences due, for example, to local and legislative reasons. Activities such as entity rollouts are significantly simplified if setups for a new entity can be compared against an existing one; however, standard reporting provides little assistance in doing this.

An even greater challenge for organisations is to compare before and after scenarios to understand the effects of activities such as patching or upgrades. Standard reporting is not provided that gives this type of perspective.