Manage Your Transition from Oracle EBS to Fusion: Pitfalls to Anticipate and Prevent
The transition from Oracle E-Business Suite’s on-premise architecture to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP represents a significant technical and operational undertaking. While Fusion offers a modern, scalable cloud platform promising substantial business benefits like enhanced efficiency and innovation, organizations often face complex challenges during the migration process. Beyond the technical mechanics of data and code transfer, successful adoption hinges on meticulously addressing inherent limitations related to system design, data integrity, integrations, testing, and ongoing platform management.
This guide essentially highlights the critical technical and implementation-focused pitfalls commonly encountered during EBS to Fusion migrations and provides actionable strategies to navigate them effectively.
1. Inadequate Modern Business Processes & Design
Treating migration as a technical lift-and-shift instead of a strategic chance to modernize business processes. This often means replicating outdated EBS processes in Fusion.
Reason
Organizations get under pressure for rapid migration or the desire to minimize perceived disruption, leading teams to simply transfer existing processes. This is compounded by “recreating” familiar legacy EBS processes rather than fully adopting Fusion’s built-in modern capabilities. Teams sometimes overlook or underestimate Fusion’s fundamentally different architectural foundation and new paradigm for workflows and reporting, contributing to the inclination to replicate the old system.
Impact
Carrying forward legacy inefficiencies negates cloud benefits. It leads to underutilizing Fusion’s potential (e.g., automation, analytics) and forcing EBS customizations into Fusion introduces unnecessary complexity.
How to Avoid?
- Conduct global process design workshops with cross-functional stakeholders
- Use Oracle’s implementation frameworks (OUM/OCIF) to align with best practices
- Challenge each legacy process: Is it still relevant in the cloud era?
- Prioritize simplification and standardization
2. Poor Strategy for Handling Customizations
Lack of a clear, well-executed plan for managing existing EBS customizations; defaulting to rebuilding them in Fusion without thorough evaluation.
Reason
Teams often fail to inventory/understand EBS customizations or default to rebuilding without evaluating Fusion alternatives. This underestimates the effort/complexity of recreating logic in the cloud and indicates a lack of clear criteria for assessing necessity.
Impact
This introduces unnecessary complexity in Fusion, increasing cost/time for migration and maintenance. It creates potential compatibility issues during updates and misses opportunities to simplify processes through standardization.
How to Avoid?
- Conduct a comprehensive customization inventory and assessment
- Analyze each customization against standard Fusion functionality
- Establish clear criteria for rebuilding (criticality, competitive advantage)
- Evaluate rebuild effort/cost versus business value
- Prioritize simplification and adopting standard Fusion processes
Poor Data Quality Migration & Cleaning
Carrying existing data quality issues (duplicate vendors, inconsistent records, outdated information) from EBS into Fusion.
Reason
Data quality issues accumulate in legacy systems over time. Data cleanup gets deprioritized due to migration time pressures, and there’s often a lack of clear ownership and governance over master data.
Impact
Poor data quality leads to inaccurate reporting, failed transactions, and operational disruptions. Cleanup becomes more difficult and costly post-migration, creating costly inefficiencies and compliance risks.
How to Avoid?
- Prioritize master data cleansing as a critical pre-migration activity
- Address duplicates, standardize naming conventions, and resolve inconsistencies
- Use data profiling and cleansing tools where possible
- Establish clear data ownership and ongoing governance processes in Fusion
4. Integration Challenges & Broken Network System
Underestimating the complexity and criticality of integrating Fusion with other enterprise systems; insufficient planning or leaving integrations until late in the project.
Reason
Teams underestimate the number, complexity, and dependencies of required integrations. This stems from a lack of a clear integration strategy or architecture design early on, insufficient time/resources for development/testing, and often poor documentation of existing EBS integrations.
Impact
This results in broken data flows and an inability to connect critical business processes. It causes significant project delays, ongoing system instability/errors post-go-live, and necessitates manual workarounds that negate efficiency gains.
How to Avoid?
- Conduct a thorough inventory of all required integrations and map data flows
- Develop a clear integration strategy and architecture (e.g., using Oracle Integration Cloud – OIC)
- Prioritize critical integrations for the initial go-live
- Allocate sufficient time and resources for development and comprehensive testing (including end-to-end scenarios)
- Leverage Oracle’s recommended integration tools
5. Insufficient Testing & Delayed Issue Discovery
Inadequate scope or rigor in testing phases (unit, system integration, performance, user acceptance) during the initial build and migration project.
Reason
Testing timelines are often compressed due to overall project delays. This is compounded by a lack of sufficient test environments/data, inadequate business user involvement in UAT, focus only on ‘happy path’ scenarios, and poor defect tracking processes.
Impact
Frequent system malfunctions and errors occur post-go-live, causing operational impact. This leads to delayed/failed transactions, user frustration, loss of confidence, and costly emergency fixes required under pressure.
How to Avoid?
- Develop a comprehensive test strategy and plan to cover all necessary phases
- Ensure adequate test environments are provisioned with representative data
- Prioritize and execute thorough testing of critical processes and exceptions
- Actively involve business users in User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Implement robust defect tracking and resolution processes
6. Neglecting Security & Compliance
Underestimating the scope and rigor required for cloud security and compliance in Fusion; treating security as a final step rather than an integrated concern.
Reason
Teams often focus primarily on migration mechanics over configuring security. Existing EBS security models do not translate directly to Fusion’s cloud architecture, and the complexity of compliance regulations can be overwhelming without dedicated governance.
Impact
This increases the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and regulatory fines. It results in a lack of audit readiness and increases insider risk from poorly managed user accounts and privileges.
How to Avoid?
- Proactively configure Fusion’s cloud security layers from the outset
- Implement robust Identity and Access Management (IAM), including SSO and MFA
- Define and automate user provisioning processes to prevent orphaned accounts
- Ensure sensitive data is encrypted at rest and in transit
- Utilize network security controls and integrate with corporate monitoring
- Enable comprehensive logging and alerting for critical activities
7. Fragmented Data Analytics & Lack of Reporting Plan
Failing to establish a comprehensive reporting and analytics strategy before migration, leading to gaps in data visibility across legacy (EBS) and new (Fusion) systems.
Reason
Reporting requirements often evolve or are not fully defined upfront. Teams focus on operational migration over analytics continuity, sometimes assuming standard Fusion embedded analytics will cover all needs.
Impact
This results in incomplete data views impairing decision-making. Business users struggle with fragmented reports, leading to additional costs and delays for post-migration reporting retrofits.
How to Avoid?
- Develop a clear data integration strategy (e.g., data warehouse, ETL) to consolidate EBS historical data with Fusion data
- Plan how Fusion’s embedded analytics will be used for operational reporting
- Identify needs for custom reports or dashboards and budget accordingly
- Engage business intelligence teams and end-users early to map requirements
8. Unclear Licensing Strategy
Underestimating the complexity of Fusion Cloud’s subscription model compared to EBS perpetual licensing; delaying licensing discussions until late in the project.
Reason
Focus is often placed on technical migration details over commercial planning. This leads to a lack of early engagement with Oracle licensing experts, delaying critical decisions.
Impact
This results in misalignment between business needs and subscription tiers, leading to paying for unused features or missing essentials. It creates issues with translating legacy licenses, causing compliance risks and unexpected costs.
How to Avoid?
- Understand Fusion Cloud subscription bundles and tiers thoroughly with Oracle experts
- Conduct a detailed inventory of current EBS licenses; explore BYOL options
- Engage Oracle licensing specialists early to negotiate terms and design a framework
9. Inadequate Change Management & User Adoption
Neglecting the human element of migration; insufficient focus on communication, training, and gaining user buy-in for the new system.
Reason
Change management activities and resources are often under-prioritized. Communication is lacking or inconsistent, training programs are generic or poorly timed, and user resistance to change is underestimated or not proactively addressed.
Impact
This leads to low user satisfaction and decreased productivity post-go-live. Users may revert to old manual workarounds, failing to leverage Fusion’s full capabilities and undermining overall project success despite technical go-live.
How to Avoid?
- Develop and integrate a comprehensive change management plan into the project
- Establish a clear, multi-channel communication strategy
- Design and deliver targeted, role-based training programs well before go-live
- Identify and empower change champions across departments
- Measure and monitor user adoption post-go-live
10. Unmanaged Quarterly Updates & Overlooked Innovation
Forgetting that Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP receives mandatory quarterly updates and failing to establish a process for managing them post-initial migration.
Reason
Teams focus heavily on initial go-live and assume project work ends there. There’s often a lack of formal governance for update testing and adoption, and end users may be unaware of upcoming changes or new features.
Impact
Updates can potentially break customizations or integrations if not properly tested. This results in missing out on new features, efficiency gains, and security patches, leaving potential security vulnerabilities.
How to Avoid?
- Establish a formal, repeatable process for testing and validating quarterly updates (sandbox testing, UAT)
- Conduct a change impact assessment before each update
- Ensure clear communication and provide necessary training/documentation to end-users
Conclusion
Successfully migrating from EBS to Fusion is reaching a technical go-live milestone and establishing a stable, efficient, and future-ready cloud platform. Neglecting crucial technical considerations, such as data cleansing, integration design, testing scope, and ongoing update management, alongside their direct impact on business processes and operations, can severely limit the return on investment. Proactively addressing these challenges ensures technical integrity and sets the foundation for realizing Fusion’s promise of improved efficiency, scalability, and continuous innovation. ITOrizon experts seamlessly navigate these implementation complexities, allowing organizations to unlock the full strategic value of their cloud ERP investment. Contact today!
