Move Customization to Prod

Hi Geraldine, are you saying you customized over 100 forms, or that you used 100 forms to do "data setup" in order to test the customization? Unfortunately, Lawson doesn't have the ability, like you talk about with SAP (JDE had it as well) where you could "layer" the customization on top of delivered product in order to easily move it. The reality is that some customizations can be segmented into a 'custom" system code, they often end up being pretty intrusive and can be a nightmare to maintain...

Geraldine, I too came from SAP, JDE and Peoplesoft environment and I can tell you they do have different ways of migrating objects from one environment to another. In Lawson there are several dumps/load utility that you can use to migrate your program etc. I'm just puzzled about your statement about customization. Are you customizing existing programs?, creating new system codes? Are you also writing new program as well? If you are customising delivered programs then you have to understand that these will be replaced by any minor or major updates/upgrades.

Here's what we do here to avoid confusion:

1. For system codes, we used X1-X9,Y1-Y9,Z1-Z9 and W1-toW9 to simulate
existing codes. In fact they are just an extension to the delivered codes.
example for PR (payroll) we have X4, BN (benefit) we have Y1 and so on.
So our programs always has a prefix of X1, X2 etc. They are not in separate system codes but they belong to the system codes they simulated.

2. If we have to modify a deliverd program then we copy it into a different
name and use the modified program instead. ex.. PR160 became X4160.

3. We do have a change management system to track version control.

Sorry, I'm causing confusion with my terminology. To clarify, yes what I did was data setup. I added a new payroll company which for us is a process level. In addition to the basic setup, we have several benefit plans that are unique to an individual process level. The result is when I go to production I will need to go to close to 100 forms to Add or change data. It's not so much the effort involved, but rather I'm concerned about opportunity for fat fingering of missing something when inputting directly into production. Anyway thank you for the responses. I had heard that Lawson didn't have something similar to the SAP transport, but wanted to double check or see if anyone had any creative ways of handling. Thanks!

Geraldine, Lawson doesn't have an easy way to what you are trying to do. However, what I have done in the past to make this sort of migration easy is to use the Lawson's Excel Addins to dump the setup data from dev/test, prune out what I don't want, and then upload the setup data.

There are command line utilities that could accomplish this. I have used rngdbdump -c together with importdb -af to copy data from one environment to another. This bypasses all error checking, etc. so you need to ready to restore if something goes wrong.

If available the Addins would seem safer.

Thanks for the suggestions. The Addins sounds like an option. Seems like Lawson should develop an utility but maybe I'm just an SAP snob :) Thanks again!