Time to take technical debt to task
After three years of drought, including two years of pandemic-induced economic and supply chain disruption, Namoi Cotton, was ready to ramp up again. With prices for lint cotton — the raw fibre from the cotton plant after the ginning process removes the seed and other unwanted material — at their highest levels in years due to pent-up demand, the time was right.
However, over the previous years, Namoi Cotton had accumulated considerable technical debt. Because finances were tight, there had been little budget to spare on upgrading systems. In particular, the company’s core Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 ERP — was long past its end of supported life. As well as being expensive to maintain, Namoi was no longer eligible for security patches, bug fixes, and other important updates.
As Namoi Cotton’s business started to expand again, the company’s new manager of IT, Jim Tolson, proposed to management that it was time to upgrade the out of support ERP system, move away from a reliance on outdated hardware, and host it in a public cloud. But Tolson needed to make a compelling case for the cloud migration, which included keeping costs to a minimum.