Episode 14 - Upgrades

Yeah, that's, you know, in this SaaS world that we're all still familiarizing with, depending on what the VAR's legacy practice was, for example, you know, we upgrade every year.

It's just what we do.

And that concept is new for some people that actually have to do that annual upgrade.

But for many reasons, one being in the SaaS, two security, right, it's a requirement.

So that seems to be something you really dug into and identified as, hey, this needs to be scalable, especially for a VAR practice, right? How do we build a system that's scalable? So before we talk about kind of your journey to the solution, What breaks when this is ignored? Like what happens if, you know, either an end customer doesn't have a great roadmap for success on an upgrade, or as a reseller, you're scaling your practice and you kind of leave this part out.

Tell me about

that.

So both sides break, right? So the idea of being intentional is always find a good way to get in, prepare a customer to be able to test, right? Find the failure points in testing, fix them, document, and make sure we all know what we fixed, right? Because nothing like doing it.

Because you have to do it twice.

You expect whatever breaks to break again on production cutover.

So when we do that all in the sandbox, and for SaaS customers, Acumatica gives them the 90-day sandbox and makes it easy.

So when we follow that pattern and we catch... you know the major things then everybody can treat from a support standpoint we treat it all as a medium sense of urgency right we can fix it tomorrow because it's the sandbox

yeah

when we skip that step we just jump right to the finish line It's almost inevitable.

Upgrade scripts that people use for testing, they catch the base system.

Now we're customized, we're adding ISVs, we're tailoring these things in pretty well, and it shuts the business down.

Like if you can't process a sales order, it's pretty hard to make money.

And when it comes to our team, what breaks is now we took a, okay, I can put this and figure this out and pull the team together.

kind of figure out what is the best solution to fix the problem to, I'm now on a call with a client for possibly multiple hours until we get them situated.

Is it a customization that broke? Well, now I have an extra party that's involved.

I have a developer involved trying to figure out what the problem is until we solve it all.

Um,

it,

it, It's much easier to be intentional and proactive, get in, get a good testing script.

And we do tell our customers, you know the system better than anybody.