The Difficult Path to Software Upgrades
A1. Both Westjet Airlines and Jetblue Airways approached the process of upgrading their system in a different way. Westjet Airlines was a the predecessor for the upgrade and thus had to plan the process anew. The process for westjet was to implement all the changes in one go, on one day during the light winter traffic. They tried to move substantial amount of customer reservation data in one go, and ideally, all systems (like reservations, check-ins, kiosks etc) were to come online at once when the data was moved to new location. But that did not happen. To exacerbate the problem, the customers were not pre-informed about the change and thus did not have time to make necessary adjustments to their schedules. In the midst of all the chaos, there were no fallback reservation agents or nearly enough call centre employees to address the problems of all customers flying that day and facing delays.
While the difference that Jetblue made to its process, was to have all ‘plan B’s’ in place. They expected the worst to happen, when the upgrade was going on. Thus they were better equipped to deal with any uncharted problems that they might be faced with. The risk assessment before upgrade was a curtial process that Jetblue invested in and took seriously. This was one of the outstanding differences in the upgrade process, that made a huge difference in customer experience during the upgrade implementation.
A2. The process followed by Jetblue for upgrade was a big improvement over westjet fiasco. They took all the necessary measures to avoid problems faced by westjet. They had fallback servers, they cut bookings to minimum for the day, they chose the day (Saturday) wisely. Saturdays meant thin traffic and thus even if something unpredictable happened, leant number of people would get affected by it..They had extra reservation agents as a fallback option to its booking system which it did not expect to function smoothly at first go. It hired temporary call centre employees at offshore locations, ready to swoop in if situation got out of hand to handle the excess of customer calls that would result, in case of system failure. They did face some technical hurdles, but customer resentment was maintained at bare minimum. Making these fallback arrangements meant extra expenses, by according to vice president of Jetblue Rick Zeni, it was the best investment they could have made at that stage, keeping in mind the large risks that go hand in hand with any system upgrade. The fallback servers were a huge help, as they had to be used at two different occasions during the implementation. Which meant the precautions did come to the rescue, and because of these, the data of the customer’s that would otherwise have been lost, was retained, and was accessible all during the upgrade process. Thus according to me, the precautionary measures went a long way in helping jetblue with the successful upgrade.
A3. SAP customers have two choices. They can upgrade to the most recent version of the application suite or they can integrate third-party products into their existing infrastructure. The first version i.e. upgrading the complete SAP suite. Benefits of a complete upgrade include reduced cost of vendor support, more availability of features which are integrated, as opposed to the integration that will need to be specially carried out and paid for, if only enhancement packs are upgraded. The maintenance cost as incurred on the whole system (after one time upgrade) might be lesser than, if different vendors had implemented different systems. These type of upgrades can be done by R3 loyal customers that are sure they want to keep using the SAP suite in the future.
But there are benefits to just using upgrades in packs. These packs allow customers to get set number of features enhanced, which are more important to the client. Here the benefits are cost cutting on a complete system upgrade, being able to use the latest technology in areas that are the most important to the client (such as customer facing areas might be more crucial to a service based company, as compared to the backend operations). But the maintenance costs might quickly rise. These type of upgrades are useful to customers who want the flexibility to switch between applications and still get best out of each system. (Marakas et al 2013)
References
Marakas, G. M., & O'Brien, J. A. (2013). Introduction to information systems. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin
