I traveled to Indiana two weeks ago to meet with several of our customers. Surety Systems regularly does business with eight JD Edwards customers in the northeastern portion of Indiana, so I’ll typically travel there once a quarter. Three of these customers are currently running various versions of JDE World. From our conversations, I noticed two main themes that emerged from each of these customers:
- Each company is having internal discussions about possibly migrating to EnterpriseOne.
- Key decision makers at each company were frustrated by the lack of info readily available on new functionality available in World A9.4
Their comments about the lack of JD Edwards World A9.4 content honestly didn’t surprise me. There really hasn’t much publicity around new 9.4 functionality, so I thought it might be helpful to do a little research. After scouring the internet, and obtaining documentation from Oracle themselves, I was finally able to get to the heart of these new enhancements. For those of you interested, please see our consolidated list of key functionality enhancements that you can expect to see in the new JD Edwards World A9.4:
Expense Management Application
- Allows companies to manage all of their employee expenses including expense entry, approval, and reporting.
- This functionality is fully integrated with Financials, Project Management and Procurement.
- Employees will be able to create expense reports, manage expenses charged to a company credit card, track and manage purchase cards, and enter transactions paid for with cash, check, or other credit cards by the employee.
- Expense Management also creates new expense categories for purchase card management. This new feature automatically updates employees’ transactions with the correct account info based on the expense category entered.
Work Center Enhancements
- Allows companies to define, track, and analyze cost variances by work center, instead of just by cost components. This will help companies be able to make corrective adjustments when necessary.
- Ability to freeze costs through variance journal entries. Customers are able to manually enter extra costs at the work center level…which are automatically accumulated in the Cost Component Detail file.
Forecast Consumption by Customer
- Improved forecasting and requirements planning accuracy. Forecasts can now be defined and consumed by the customer based on actual sales and shipments. Companies are able to gain better insight into actual customer-specific daily demand.
- Allows companies to set up forecasts for each customer separately, allowing them to more accurately plan for specific demand from individual customers.
Encumbrance Enhancements
- Improves the tracking and auditing of commitments/encumbrances when POs are canceled.
- Prevents a customer from canceling a purchase order created in a different fiscal year.
- Allows the program to capture the cancel date when a purchased order with commitments is canceled.
Financial Tax Reconciliation
- Improvements in the recording, reporting, and reconciling of tax information between Sales Orders/Accounts Receivable and Purchasing/Accounts Payable.
- New tax fields added to AP and AR that store tax information supplied by Sales Order Management and Procurement.
Various International Localizations for the EU, Italy, France, Belgium, and Brazil
For Oracle’s complete list of new functionality/enhancements that can be found in JD Edwards World A9.4, check out Oracle’s List of Enhancements.
