Federal Signal: JDE Upgrade & Oracle OCI

About the Client

Federal Signal was founded in 1901 as Federal Electric Company in Chicago, Illinois by John Goehst, James Gilchrist, and John Gilchrist. The company originally manufactured and sold store signs lit by incandescent lamps. As Federal Signal grew and diversified, they went public in 1969 (NYSE – FSS). Today, Federal Signal designs, manufactures and supplies a suite of products and integrated solutions for municipal, governmental, industrial, and commercial customers under a variety of recognized brand names. Headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, the company has over 3,100 employees worldwide, 14 principal manufacturing facilities in 5 countries, and sales in excess of $1B.

Challenges the Client Faced

With their third-party hosting contract coming up for renewal, Federal Signal faced several key challenges. They were currently running an older release of JD Edwards, EnterpriseOne 8.11, and were using third-party support for both the application and database, which limited both their support options and their ability to add new JD Edwards functionality. Their dealers and distributors couldn’t easily access the system. The current environment was antiquated and ran on a variety of platforms, including the database running Oracle 11G on Solaris; the enterprise servers running on Linux and Windows; and the web, deployment, and DSI servers running on Windows.

Federal Signal was faced with several options as they strategized next steps, including migrating to the Cloud, remaining with their current hosting provider, moving to a new hosting provider, or bringing it back in-house. After evaluating their options, they decided to move forward with Oracle Public Cloud (IaaS and PaaS). GSI would handle the migration to the Cloud, the upgrade to the latest release of JD Edwards, as well as provide managed services.

GSI's Solution

Federal Signal divided the high-profile project into two phases to reduce their risk and complexity. Phase 1 included a lift and shift of their existing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11 environment to the Oracle Public Cloud, which was successfully completed in four months with no business impact.

The second phase of the project included the upgrade to the latest application release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. This was successfully completed in six months, including addressing technical considerations, approximately 3,000 customizations, and 27 integrations.

As part of future phases, Federal Signal plans to leverage the full capabilities of the system, including UX One, E1 Pages, Orchestrator and Mobility AIS. They also plan to leverage core capabilities provided by GSI, including GENIUS AI advanced monitoring and analytics, gShield security tools, and RapidReconciler inventory software.