The collision of rapidly changing technologies, combined with changes in the way businesses operate, has created a new competitive landscape. In response, Oracle is investing in four main components to give its JD Edwards customers the tools necessary to reinvent their businesses and take the offensive within their respective marketplaces. Oracle’s investment strategy is centered on digital transformation and how the JD Edwards community can embrace the change that digital brings, as well as the pace of that change.
In other words, think of the JD Edwards product team as the first heat pacer in a race. Your business is drafting behind them, reaping the benefits, while they do the heavy lifting.
So what are these four key investment areas?
ERP Enhancements and Industry-Based Capabilities
It’s all about ERP functionality. Lyle Ekdahl was, of course, specifically referring to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2—and its increasing industry-based capabilities—when he spoke about this during his keynote session at InFocus17. Ekdahl and his team are moving beyond what have become highly commoditized business processes and focusing on businesses by vertical. To do this, they’re working to gain a better understanding of JD Edwards user businesses.
A larger commitment to rich industry functionality is visible in the new modules released on the 9.2 code line, like outbound inventory management and project forecasting. And according to plans discussed at InFocus17, there’s much more to come.
Personalized User Experience
But what good is an ERP system if no one is using it? Not very. Oracle knows this and is committed to making JD Edwards a tool that’s not only easy to use but also an engaging experience for its users. Complementary to the industry focus on the product level, there is a new role-based focus at the user level through UX One.
Alert, Analyze, and Act is the underlying concept that is the driving force behind UX One, which already has 50 role-based experiences released across 23 functional areas. UX One empowers the individual users to personalize their experience with low code or no code that form fits into your JDE environment, without going to IT or a developer. (Check out this powerpoint from Oracle that breaks down UX One role by role.)
Digital Technologies for Business Transformation
By leveraging digital technology as an extension of your individual team, you can make your entire JD Edwards environment more agile, adaptable, and able. Let the technology work for you by building process automation using the Orchestrator functionality, which Oracle just announced is now bundled with core tools (read: no extra licensing fees!). Basically, if there’s a program you can run in JD Edwards today, you can use AIS and Orchestrator to build automation around it.
What’s even better is the ease in which these technologies can now interact with mobile devices, further enhancing collaborative capabilities. So far there are more than 80 mobile applications available for EnterpriseOne. Things like mobile watchlists, barcode scanning, location-based services, and mobile cloud service integration.
Speaking of Cloud…
Cloud Enablement
When you hear “cloud,” Oracle wants you to think security and scalability. Each of the three layers of cloud (Saas, PaaS, and IaaS) is respectively designed to complement, extend, and optimize your JD Edwards applications.
I won’t go in depth here on the cloud; you can dive into that in our six-part series (yes, six), JD Edwards In The Cloud. But I do want to briefly cover something new and cool that Ekdahl presented at InFocus17: the Content and Experience Cloud. This system integrates with JD Edwards out of the box and enables users to have conversations and share documents in context with any JDE transaction or entity. Pretty slick. It’s in the PaaS layer, for those of you paying attention.
If you weren’t able to attend InFocus this year or you just can’t quench your thirst for JDE knowledge, see our InFocus 2017 Recap for some more JDE gems.
