FINDING THE BEST PATH FORWARD | HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN A STRATEGIC JDE ROADMAP 

Dan Barford: 

We’re going to touch on some new features of JD Edwards 9.2, and then talk a little bit about the enablement projects that we’re seeing customers leverage within the product. At that point, we’re going to switch gears a little bit and discuss a little organizational change management. Tom Colbert is going to touch on a few things around change and resistance, leveraging OCM to deliver business and technology changes successfully, and then what those roles look like on typical projects. So, let’s jump into it. As I mentioned, my name is Dan Barford, and I’m a vice president at Terillium overseeing our JD Edwards practice, along with me is Jason Batte, who is also a VP and covers our install base in a lot of our technology. And then Tom Colbert is the director of our OCM practice, and he’s going to be covering those topics today. 

Dan Barford: 

Jason, Tom and I all work for Terillium. We’re a Cincinnati based Oracle partner, who have been specializing in JD Edwards for over two decades. We’ve got 170 employees, and they live all over the country. We’ve got over 700 customers over the years who have chosen us to work with them on their JD Edwards projects, and racked up quite a few Oracle Excellence Awards over the years. So, JD Edwards, past, present and future. Anybody who’s been around long enough, may remember this old timeline, and this goes back to the mid 90s and shows both EnterpriseOne or One World on the top, and JD Edwards World. And that was the plan and the strategy for JD Edwards back then, it was to offer these releases on a regular basis, keep the product up to date, keep the functionality relevant and changing with the times. 

Dan Barford: 

And we got to the point in 2015, when 9.2 was released for EnterpriseOne. And now we have this roadmap where the 9.2 product is going to be supported through at least 2031 with continuous innovation, continuous updates, and you can see the cadence about every year, toward the end of the year, a major update is released for that. And we’re going to touch on what that means, and typically what that includes. And what’s exciting about that, is it’s a new way to deliver software. So customers are able to take smaller incremental updates as they can and as their business allows, and if they can’t over the course of time, then collectively those smaller incremental feature packs which are represented by those black dots, are bundled together and then released as a major update, which the last one that just came out was in November of last year, 9.2.5. And along that same time of when 9.2 came out, it came out with this UX Vision, alert, analyze, act. 

Dan Barford: 

Again, if you’ve been involved in any presentations over the past few years, you’ve probably seen this message where the system can be configured and personalized to proactively alert you to a condition, give you the tools to analyze what that alert references and the ability to act upon that. And these came with the ways that you can personalize and configure EnterpriseOne, versus customization, which has been a key change in how people are adopting the functionality and the tools and technology offered by the product. And then of course, giving you access to JD Edwards anywhere anyhow. So whether you’re sitting at your desk, or whether you’re on the go with a tablet, or a mobile device, it was part of that UX Vision. That vision continues today now, as that strategy transitions into more of an optimization, transformation and automation approach. So optimizing the applications within EnterpriseOne, how do you protect the business while making improvements, and allowing that to continue on into the future? 

Dan Barford: 

How do you take that journey into a digital transformation with your ERP? Is it leveraging process automation through things like Orchestrator or other RPA tools? It’s leveraging that low or no code user interface, and then taking advantage of integrations with other enterprise applications and then applying that to more of an automated framework where things can maintain themselves or run more efficiently, and allow you to focus on innovation within the business. And then looking forward, there is that future strategy that will continue at the application level, the digital strategy, continuing that digital transformation, and that system automation. And so from an application perspective, you might see planned enhancements for functions and modules within the system. You will see additional tools and technology introduced to build upon what has already been built into the product. And then again, that automation, whether it’s around scaling, or automating packages, monitoring, those are all planned functions that JD Edwards has for the product. So the investment continues well into the future. 

Dan Barford: 

And so if we talk about some of the new features in EnterpriseOne 9.2. So I mentioned that update five came out back in November, and included over 90 functional improvements across 19 modules within the system. Some ones that we’ve highlighted, that we feel are pretty important to the system and what customers we see are running, things like the Work Order Ledger, that’s been an issue for a long time, it’s been a customer request out there that’s now available. Things like quantity restrictions on work order completions, license plate picking optimization, and that list goes on for over 90 of those specific functional improvements in the system. So if you’re not aware of these enhancements, or you’re looking to take advantage of them, and you’re already on 9.2, there are ways that we can help get you to understand what those mean and how you could apply them. 

Dan Barford: 

From a technology standpoint, UX One has always been at the foundation of 9.2. And these are just some of the things that have been introduced and then enhanced over the years. Watchlist, the Enterprise Search, the ability to format your grid has always been around, but now there’s more ways to control that, better ways to manage and share. And along with the rest of those UX One features like the Cafe One, the Form Extensions, the Composed Pages. And one thing that we have seen is really in combining these features. So we already consider individually UX One components to be powerful. But when you combine them… So for example, when you take a Grid Format and personalize it, you can then apply an Advanced Query on top of that, which gives you more search features than just your QBE line. If you take that Advanced Query and turn it into a Watchlist, now you’re proactively looking for a situation within your transactions that you can monitor. From there, you can attach that Watchlist to a Composed Page. So now that alert is front and center for your users to see on a daily basis. 

Dan Barford: 

You can then combine the orchestration and notification features to make that Watchlist not just available as a function of that Composed Page, but as a proactive notification that’s going to someone’s email or their text message and giving them the opportunity to respond to that. So we see this foundation of features being very important to both the present day users of EnterpriseOne as well as those in the future. So I’m going to turn it over to Jason, who’s going to talk a little bit about what we consider JDE enablement projects. And these are people who are leveraging EnterpriseOne within these different categories. And we’re going to break these down into a little bit more detail. Again, all in the theme of why we consider JD Edwards future being very bright. 

Upgrading to 9.2, cloud hosting, 64 bit, streamlining integrations, leveraging Orchestrator, automation, and more 

Jason Batte: 

Thank you, Dan. Again, as Dan mentioned, we’re very excited to be here. Again, it would be much better to be in Vegas at a different location being able to see everybody. But as Dan mentioned, there’s a lot of new things in 9.2. We purposely didn’t put in demos and things like that in this session. We know there’s going to be tons of sessions throughout the week around Orchestrator, UX One, hosting, cloud type sessions, and we definitely encourage you to visit those. What we want to do with this is highlight, here’s what JD Edwards has been doing for the product… Oracle has been doing for JD Edwards, but also here’s what Terillium as an organization has been working with their customers on. So 2020 was a very different year for everybody, and here we are early part of 2021. And what we did is we kind of highlighted the nine top projects that we see our customers doing. 

Upgrading to 9.2 

Jason Batte: 

The good news is a lot of people doing things with JD Edwards, they’re trying to expand on it. A lot of customers had JD Edwards for many years and spent very little time changing the system, they just kind of maintain the system. Now we have a lot of customers talking about really making it work better for their organization and trying to work with the organization to improve JD Edwards to support the organizational strategy, that in change of management kind of go hand in hand, which Tom will be talking about. And quickly, the nine projects we have as of course, a lot of people are upgrading, we’re going to talk about upgrades to 9.2, as well as upgrades for customers that are on 9.2. A lot of customers are talking about hosting, integration has been a very big topic of new tools and technology available with 9.2 that are making the integration much easier. Reducing modifications, of course, UX One and Orchestrator, everybody’s trying to understand how to leverage that to improve their business. Process improvements. 

Jason Batte: 

A lot of customers who started on JD Edwards 10 years ago, trying to figure out the way that we did advanced pricing 10, 15 years ago isn’t the way we do today, how do we make it work for us today? And then also process standardization, new modules, so rolling out new feature functionality, customers building SAAS products alongside with JD Edwards, and then acquisition and rollouts. So we’ll start with the upgrade. So of course, the first thing is getting to 9.2. And I appreciate everybody who responded to the poll. It’s interesting, 85% are on 9.2, and 15% are not quite on 9.2. But realistically, get to 9.2. There’s a number of reasons. You reduce risk for your infrastructure, it kind of builds a foundation for you to be able to enable new features, functionalities, you can start focusing on business operations, as opposed to maintaining the system itself. As well as, 9.2 is going to be much more flexible than the other releases that allows you to react rapidly to the changing business conditions. 

Jason Batte: 

And a lot of the customers we talked to have been kind of throwing curve balls this year, with needing to do more remotely, a lot of acquisitions, a lot of divestitures, a lot of shifting in just how you do business. And number one thing for customers, people on 9.2, we’ve been able to react. So key reason to get to 9.2. Then let’s talk about the different types of upgrades in 9.2 for the people that haven’t made it there. There’s a lot of discussions about apples to apples, lift and shift, like for like, technical upgrade. That’s all one way of doing a project, which is basically saying, “Let’s take what we have today and get it to the latest release.” This is going to be the quickest, least risk project to get you the 9.2. And really what you’re doing with this, you’re focusing on reducing the risk of your infrastructure. So you have old servers, old OS, old databases, you’re trying to get… Chrome came out with a new update, caused some issues. 

Jason Batte: 

So helping to stay ahead of the curve on the technology perspective is why a lot of people are doing apples to apples. When customers are talking about doing upgrades, they also say, “Hey, we want to reduce modifications as part of doing this apples to apples, lift and shift, or technical upgrade. And what we have been talking to customers about, let’s be cautious about reducing modifications, there are definitely some things you can do to change how modification is being done with UX One, but we have a lot of customers talking about, “Men, we really want to get rid of this intrusive modification and sales order entry.” And what we have seen for customers, is when you start looking at those deep modifications in how you do business, you’re kind of shifting away from the technical upgrade, because to reduce, or eliminate that modification, a lot of times you’re going to have to change the business process for that. So understanding how to do a technical upgrade and where the benefits are, and which modifications to remove, are very important to highlight and build out up front as part of the charter for the project. 

Jason Batte: 

Then we get into the next type of upgrade, which is kind of a functional upgrade where we do the technical part, but we also start looking at the issues that you currently have in your current system, and improving those as you go to 9.2. A lot of the improvements we’ve seen people do when they do the E1 9.2 upgrades, it’s not so much on the finance side, it’s more on the operation. So a lot of sales order, supply chain, a lot of changes in manufacturing, where people are trying to utilize more the MRP, and work orders part of it, along with Orchestrator. So there’s a lot of business impact and business process improvement projects you can do as part of your upgrade as well. So deciding which one you’re going to do, and getting there and building that plan is very important as you go. So let’s say you’re already on 9.2, what does an upgrade mean for you? Well, in the past six months, we have worked with probably about 10 customers to build a strategy around continuous adoption. 

Jason Batte: 

So, a number of the customers we have, started out on 9.2 when it came out in 2015, their infrastructure’s kind of aging, they haven’t done a bunch of the ESUs, and they’ve done pretty good keeping up with tools releases. But we talk to them about, “Hey, maybe now’s the time to do code current, tools release, new hardware, 64 bit, which is kind of a mini upgrade. So basically kind of resetting the technical side of your JD Edwards to allow you to begin staying more during the continuous adoption as you go.  

Jason Batte: 

So a lot of people are doing these mini upgrades, going through and resetting their infrastructure, resetting their plans for continuous adoption. So they’re no longer just doing this once and then forgetting it for five years and doing it again, we’re working to build a plan to do code current every year, every two years build a plan for the tools releases, I think a new tools release was just announced today. So we have a lot of customers who’ve been kind of waiting for this tools release to come out as well. So it’s very important to do that. Along with doing these many upgrades, our customers are reducing the modifications to try and make the continuous adoption much easier and better. So when you really look at it, as you look at doing an upgrade, there’s a number of those enablement projects that we showed that kind of combined for doing an upgrade. 

JDE cloud hosting options 

Jason Batte: 

Hosting, you have an option of staying on prem or going to a hosted facility, reducing modifications is a part of it, process improvement, improving the business, redoing some of your integrations and diving into UX One, or Orchestrator. So all of those are very important things you can do as part of an upgrade, or individually. Next piece we’re jumping to is hosting. Every week we have a customer call us to discuss what is our plans, what is our recommendations for hosting JD Edwards. You have tons of different options of staying on prem or using a hosting facility such as a public hosting with OCI, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, AWS, or Microsoft Azure, or even a private hosting such as one of our partners Connectria. So as customers start trying to figure out where they want to go with their system, do they want to be in the infrastructure business, probably say 85% of customers are moving to a hosted facility and getting out of the infrastructure business and letting somebody else maintain and manage that. 

Jason Batte: 

But along with the hosting, you have options of platform to stay on. We have a number of customers who are iSeries or even certain Oracle platforms moving as they upgrade or as they do a mini upgrade to Windows or Linux Oracle system. Everybody’s taken advantage of virtualization at this point. But realistically, it’s kind of figuring out where you want your hardware, and what you want to do. As part of doing a hosting move, you can get into many things such as changing integrations with that and reducing your mods even with that as well. So with this integration, so, I’ll let Dan kind of speak to that. 

Re-evaluating integrations with JD Edwards 

Dan Barford: 

Yeah. So thanks, Jason. I think one of the big project initiatives that we’ve seen is reevaluating integrations. And so now that there are new technology options within EnterpriseOne. And a lot of these technology options have existed, they might not have always been as straightforward to leverage. When 9.0, maybe even prior to that, there was this big push towards business services, which became available as API’s within EnterpriseOne, and allowed you to structure web service calls, to create transactions, to retrieve transactions, or to just simply interact with the system. And the issue that we found there, was that they were great, they were easy to expose, easy to maybe call from an external technology, but they were also very rigid in terms of what they could do. So if there was any change required, a minor customization that was maybe part of your business process, changing those business services became a larger project. Other integration needs are changing the way people access data. Gone are the days of reports or things that run overnight, and then either get printed or distributed to people, which by the time they get their hands on it, is outdated data. 

Dan Barford: 

In today’s world where everything is right at our fingertips with our smartphones, or tablets, and the ability to work remotely or connect on the fly, people are changing their demand for data access, and it’s becoming more real time. So if your integration is providing data to another system, or to a data warehouse or somewhere where that user needs to gain access to that data, they need to change the way that that integration works. Automation is just another form of an integrated transaction. So understanding that whenever someone is doing this transaction that it needs to invoke something else that might continue that process. And rather than have someone involved in that, or a human who needs to click a button, looking at ways to automate that. And all of this is really building up to leveraging Orchestrator and what it is capable of. 

Dan Barford: 

And we’ve seen more enhancements to the Orchestrator over the past several tools releases that just make it more and more exciting for partners like us, who can rely on that tool, in order for us to help customers with these integration changes, or even just as a process automation as a workflow tool, as a way to extend the capabilities of EnterpriseOne. And then finally, as you consider these things, if you’re currently invested in a middleware, there’s likely a reason. You probably have a heavy integration requirement, maybe a lot of real time data transformation, maybe a lot of ETL type transactions that have to go through a cross reference or get somehow get translated from their source to their destination. And it could be time to reevaluate that and maybe reduce the effort around what that middleware is needed for. 

Dan Barford: 

So in that same lines, as we mentioned earlier, these different enablement projects, when we get into working with integrations, it’s typically in an effort to reduce modifications, maybe introduce an improvement to the overall process. A lot of times integration is a necessity based on a best in breed product. And so if you have something that’s managing your CAC software, and you need to make sure that that’s integrated, or you have a shipping manifest system that’s helping you with your high logistics requirements, that could be the option to improve the process while also working on that integration. And then of course, leveraging UX One and Orchestrator. 

Reducing modifications 

Dan Barford: 

So the next topic along the same lines is around reducing modifications. And so historically, for the past few decades, people have modified their ERP, they’ve either created customizations that’s critical to their business, maybe it’s a competitive differentiator, or they’ve simply changed the source code because they need something that’s just not part of that base software. So why should you consider reducing those? Well, there is a cost to maintain those modifications. And if the modification was created 20 years ago, because of what the business needed, but now that business has changed, that modification may still exist in its original format, and it hasn’t changed at all, or perhaps it’s evolved to be even more invasive, as the business has changed. And what that ends up doing is sort of trapping you buy those modifications. So you might hear comments like, “Oh, we can’t upgrade because of all of our modifications.” Or, “Gosh, if we upgrade, then we’re going to have to reevaluate X, Y, and Z.” And it really limits your ability to have a continuous adoption policy. 

Dan Barford: 

So we encourage people to take time, either before, during or after an upgrade project, or even if you’ve just gotten to 9.2 and you want to take a look at how heavily modified are you, and what options you have to reduce some of that, and look at these different ways that you can do that. Can you improve your process by eliminating a modification? Can you talk the business out of what they originally requested? Can you leverage the UX One features that we just talked about a few minutes ago, with form extensions, form personalization, and other things, Cafe One? We’ve seen modifications get eliminated by just leveraging those. As a former developer, I know a lot of the work I did was changing the layout of a form. And of course, it was a mod and it changed the source code, and it sort of locked you in so that if you took an update, you would have to reapply those changes. And so now you can do that with form personalization with no code whatsoever. 

Dan Barford: 

The form extensions allow you to add fields that don’t already exist, or add buttons that can invoke an Orchestration or some other automation to continue that process down the road. So really, if you take the time to build a plan, and set smaller goals, you can’t necessarily take this all on at once and say, “We’re going to eliminate all 1000 modifications by summer,” that may not be realistic, and you don’t want to impact the business, you want to do it in small enough bites that it’s maintainable. So, on the modifications piece, we see these become part of a process improvement initiative or a process standardization initiative. So where you want to have more standard or global processes across the enterprise, a lot of times that does require you to reduce your modifications. And taking advantage of what UX One and Orchestrator can do to help in that reduction, is definitely something that we’re seeing and is recommended. So then, the next piece that we’re going to talk about is around UX One and Orchestrator. 

Dan Barford: 

This is just a portion of the UX One list that I sent previously. We’re seeing a big push for this as well. We have customers who have gotten to 9.2, they did more of a like for like, or apples to apples type upgrade, and purposely left out a lot of the main UX One features because they wanted to stay focused on getting to 9.2. So now is the time when they want to learn more about that. And we offer training around how to leverage UX One, breaking down all the different types of user defined objects and how our customers are taking advantage of them, providing use cases and basically hits on best leveraging those, then getting into Orchestrator. What’s the Orchestrator Studio and how do I use it? So training on that, understanding how to build an orchestration, how to extend processes, how to debug, how to troubleshoot, how to test and how to use it in a best practices manner, so that you can get through that whole same sort of cycle of development test and then taking it to production. 

Dan Barford: 

And then what does it mean? How do you leverage some of its functionality around automation, integration, calling external APIs, using it as a way to call EnterpriseOne APIs, and then all the testing that you can use it for as well. So to get started on these, we offer a workshop, we can do an assessment of your current environment and make sure you’ve got the right tools, you’re current with all of the server requirements, and then also provide exercises and use cases so that it’s a jumpstart to getting something going with UX One and Orchestrator. And with those projects, obviously, we see a lot of these things. A reduction of modifications, process improvements, leveraging what Orchestrator can do, process standardization, rethinking your integrations and then of course, acquisitions and rollouts. So building some consistency with those UX One features with the ability to create and then share, then your onboarding, or any kind of company growth allows you to have a consistent look and feel that you’re rolling out to people. So now that we figured out the camera situation, Jason and I are just going to swap positions for this. 

Process improvements 

Jason Batte: 

So, process improvements. I would say if you’re just sitting on JD Edwards, and not focused on how to improve, how the processes are, you are missing out on a lot of great features and capabilities of JD Edwards. Rethinking how our process flow, understanding and building out some of the new things with UX One, or Orchestrator is just going to really change what you do for your business. We actually had a customer tell us the other day about Orchestrator, that is probably one of the best things that they’ve been able to provide, they’re users in the past five or six years, they’ve automated a ton stuff, and they just found a lot of great value in using that. And it took us spending some time understanding what their needs are, and showing them the tools, the capability of the tools. 

Jason Batte: 

A lot of customers we’re going to, they did their implementation on ERPs, 15 years ago, since then, the way they do business has changed. And majority of the customers we’ve gone to, we ask them, “So, how are you doing with JD Edwards?” “We’re having issues here with a lot of spreadsheets that came up over here, a lot of data outside the system.” And part of that is because they’re not quite sure how to get it in JD Edwards, or how to change the process in JD Edwards. So we’re working with a lot of customers to do analysis of what are you using, how are you using it, and what you should be doing going forward in building that plan or a roadmap for how to make things better. We’ve had a lot of customers who had some change in leadership, whether is in IT, or the seat level in the organization that just changes how they want to do business. 

Jason Batte: 

A lot of times a new supply chain person comes in charge on the business side, and they go, “We’ve seen systems that do X, Y, and Z, we’d like JD Edwards to help us do that.” So we spend a lot of time understanding what the new processes are, and again, trying to figure out how to solve that within JD Edwards not by pulling data out or doing an Excel spreadsheet. The impact of process improvements. In 9.2, you’re going to get better visibility to the data, you’re going to have better access to the data, you’re going to be able to normalize the data. And from our perspective, data ownership is very important. We did another poll to see how many people were on here from the IT side and how many are from the business. Majority are from the IT side, and I think one of the things that we hear our customer talk about both from IT and on the business, is ownership of data. And whoever owns the data eventually owns the process. 

Jason Batte: 

We have worked with our customers to get more of the ownership of the data in the business’s hands, which would help them articulate and help us figure out what kind of data they need, and we can have the process help facilitate that. A lot of customers are trying to do more with less. So we have a lot of standardization, consolidation projects, if you will. So whether that’s with an acquisition or I rolled out JD Edwards to eight different facilities and they kind of did it differently each time, we have a lot of customers looking at it going, “You know what? Let’s kind of standardize some of our processes to make it a little bit easier.” Mobile is huge. We have probably 50 to 60% of our customers are asking about getting JD Edwards data outside the four walls, outside of the building, whether it’s on a mobile device, or just being able to do quick and easy functional specific things with a mobile device, an iPad and iPhone. 

Jason Batte: 

So, we’ve seen a lot of that. As well as new module such as advanced warehousing or new cloud product that’s out there such as Oracle supply chain and things like that. We’re going to talk about those two a little bit later. But as you look at the process improvements, again, it kind of encompasses some of the other enablement projects around new modules, reducing modifications, process standardization of course, really UX One and Orchestrator is key to the foundation of being able to do process improvements, especially around automation. Process standardization, kind of discuss this a little bit why your system is not standardized. Many years of system rollouts and different requirements. So you have a rollout to one part of your business, and a couple years later, you have another rollout at another part, the way things need to be done, or wanted to be done may not be standardized. So we have a lot of customers looking at their system holistically and going, “Okay, can we start getting to one way of doing sales orders, let’s make sure we agree on our order types. Let’s make sure we agree on the process and things moving through.” 

Jason Batte: 

Standardization, you’ll find a lot of spreadsheets out there to run the business. So you give your users business process at JD Edwards, they don’t like it, they start moving data into a spreadsheet, and they start spending more time looking at a spreadsheet than they do looking at JD Edwards. And when they start looking at spreadsheets, they only want to look at the spreadsheet. So we’re trying to get more data back into JD Edwards with a standardization. Employee turnover. We’ve had a lot of customers go and start talking about, “Man, we have… Heather did this job she left and went to Tom who started this job, Heather just told Tom how to do it. Well, Tom’s leaving, and Tom showed his next resource to do it a different way.” So there’s just kind of the telephone game of how to do it, lack of documentation and standard operating processes, or operating procedures. So we’re helping customers get through that and start rebuilding that to tighten the capabilities and standardization of the system. 

Jason Batte: 

So how does it help? You have a defined documented standard operating procedure, which will improve onboarding for new individuals. Again, ERPs are meant to be used by the companies, so that is not one person who has all the information, it’s shared, that the data in an ERP can be used throughout the enterprise to be used to make decisions. That goes with data visibility. Acquisitions. If you have a standardization, you can go into this acquisition and say, “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s how we’re doing it, and here’s what we’re going to get to get started.” So it helps the acquisition go faster. And then more importantly, with what’s going on with COVID, having a standard process, or a standard operating procedure, it makes it much easier to support the remote workforce and how things need to be done, why they need to be done that way. That long return over kind of helps. Process standardization, you get to a lot of customers are reducing modifications because a lot of the mods were meant to facilitate one business decision or reason at one point. Process improvements. 

Jason Batte: 

Again, if you’re standardizing processes, you get to look at the three four ways that you’re doing those processes across your enterprise and go, “Okay, here’s the best one. Here’s what we want to do as a business and you can implement that.” Acquisition and rollout just makes it much easier for your acquisitions. And then of course, again everything is really the foundation is UX One to be able to utilize all those tools and technology. So, new modules. We have customers who implemented financials sales order entry, even manufacturing inside of JD Edwards. And they’re looking at doing more with JD Edwards. So the business is asking them to do more. We have listed there some key projects that we have going on now. Customers are starting to ask us about it, “Man, how do we manage our capital assets with doing things like preventive maintenance or just maintaining and having the assets be able to provide data back to headquarters for preventive maintenance?” Warehouse management, we have people looking to do advanced warehousing, maybe replacing an old ERP for warehousing they have on a different platform. 

Jason Batte: 

A number of customers are looking to implement transportation management, taking it to the next level, taking a bunch of sales orders, wrapping them up into a load that can be easily used to pass information from you and your customer with the data. Requisition self service, a lot of people are trying to change how procurement is done and we have a lot of customers utilizing the requisition self service module. And of course, lease accounting. Everybody knows about lease accounting, you got another year or maybe two for that, but JD Edwards has provided the capabilities with their module around property management to do the lease accounting, so we are working with a number of customers to work through that. And then we also have a number of customers looking at, “Here’s what JD Edwards can do, man, we sure [inaudible 00:39:28] could do X, Y, and Z looking at other products such as Oracle Cloud supply chain management, procurement cloud and EPM on the financial side.” So we have a lot of customers looking out there trying to figure out, “What software should we be using for these processes?” 

Jason Batte: 

JD Edwards has a lot of great capabilities that a lot of customers are not taking advantage of. A lot of these fringy type products have some newer capabilities that may not be in JD Edwards. We may have customers looking at, “Okay, if we go this way, if we extend the capability of JD Edwards with one of these other cloud solutions, how do we integrate that and make sure that we keep things moving through JD Edwards, which tends to be the hub?” So, new modules. Again, hosting is a big one for new modules, reducing modifications, process improvements will help with going to a new module and utilizing more functionality. Process standardization, as well as integration if you’re doing a SaaS model with JD Edwards, or even if you’re bringing more data into JD Edwards and reducing the need for an integration, a warehouse management system or something like that. But definitely, you can see that there’s a lot of things you can do with JD Edwards. With that side, and the final one that we’re going to focus on is acquisition and rollouts. 

Jason Batte: 

Over the past year, we have seen this increase from a handful of projects a year to now we have about 20 customers who are focused on acquisition and rollouts. So, what we want to do with this is work with our customers to build a strategy for this. If the strategy for the business is to do acquisitions, a lot of private equity buying smaller manufacturing companies, looking to keep buying other companies and be able to bring those onto JD Edwards. So it’s a way to react to your business strategy. The important thing with customers is to reduce the transition services agreement from the company that you’re buying from to where it’s going to your company. One of the best ways to do that is to have a standardized global process, or global model, where hopefully, in that global model, you have detailed out 80% of the processes that you will need to support any business that you’re looking at, and you can quickly take your global model of what you’re doing at JD Edwards and go to a new company that you acquired and pull it in quickly, efficiently. 

Jason Batte: 

It has a defined set of documentation, standard operating procedures that have defined data conversion, what data do we need from that company, to be able to do the acquisition quickly and support the processes? And we try and build a model that we hope is going to be 80% usable for everybody. But of course, we all understand there’s going to be localizations at that company level. And what we tend to do with our customers, is let’s get them onto JD Edwards quickly to reduce the overall cost of the transition services agreement and then focus on continuous improvement at that customer, once you got everything over on to that system, and you kind of own their processes. We have a lot of customers as they’re doing this, they’re trying to understand, is it the time to have a separate instance for JD Edwards for this other customer? Do we create another environment for them? Do we bring them into our system? So that’s a vague discussion to have, depending on the size of your acquisition. 

Jason Batte: 

But again, if your organization is looking into acquiring companies and JD Edwards is where you’re going to be putting them or would like to put them, number one, make sure JD Edwards is what you have and how you want it, and that it works well. Build a model, define a model, make sure it will work for 80% of the companies you’re looking for. If you happen to start looking at different companies than what you currently have, maybe you build two global models, one for two different types of companies, we’ve done that for some customers. But really, the important thing for acquisitions is getting people on board very quickly with the processes and the standard operating procedures, the data conversions take a long time. So getting through that pretty quickly with a standard process is going to help you achieve that turnover or move into your system as quick as possible. So, acquisitions, again, UX One has been on every slide, very important to help automate some of that, whether it’s an interface or bringing data in. Process improvements, usually after the acquisition is done, but process standardization is key for the acquisitions and rollouts. 

Jason Batte: 

And that’s our nine enablement projects, and we’re going to have Dan, come up here and talk about how one of our customers kind of went through many of these. Mr. Barford. 

Dan Barford: 

Thanks, Jason. So, I just want to touch on one of our customers Flatiron Construction, they’re out in Broomfield and they focus on what is typically considered the horizontal construction space. So, bridges, roads, infrastructure type stuff. And if you look at their strategic IT roadmap, it started with a migration from World to EnterpriseOne. So, it was very much a like for like migration, with the exception of some improvements that we introduced in payroll. Some of the ways they were doing it in World, just weren’t necessary, and so we are able to back those out, but really focus to the rest of the project on a like for like, while also building their core team. So they had some new employees in IT, no exposure really to JD Edwards, and they only knew what they knew because someone told them what options to click in World and what to do. So we built them as more super users by the end of the project. In addition, they did change hosting providers and changed from the iSeries to SQL server for their EnterpriseOne architecture. 

Dan Barford: 

So, we went live with that very quickly after… In fact, in parallel before we even went live, we started phase two, which now was more or less a new module rollout. So if you think back to those enablement projects, that first one was an upgrade, or migration, the second one was rolling out procurement and capital asset management to their whole organization. And it very much included Orchestrator and mobile. So from an Orchestrator perspective, a lot of Flatiron’s equipment has built in telematics. Still, whether it’s Caterpillar, John Deere, Komatsu, all these OEMs have built in connections that allowed us to get real time information from their equipment. So location, tire pressure, fuel amount, the different details we needed to feed into JDE in order to invoke a preventive maintenance message to say, “It’s time to service this piece of equipment.” From a procurement perspective, that was rolled out using requisition self service along with an approval hierarchy with those approvals being on mobile devices in order to recognize they received a request, they could review it and approve it all on that. So, that went live. 

Dan Barford: 

In the meantime, there was planning around the next phase, which was more or less continuous improvements. And this had a dual effort, it was rolling out some AP automation functionality, so taking advantage of a third party that does invoice scanning and some auto voucher matching capability, and then expanding their mobile footprint while also reducing modifications. And so if you think back to those enablement projects, there was some process improvement introduced here in the ways of introducing efficiencies to AP, there was a reduction in modifications as they just evaluated what they had done and decided to back things out. And taking advantage of additional mobile functions within the organization. All of that set the stage for what they’re currently doing, which is a mini upgrade. So just started a few weeks ago, they are getting current on 9.2.5, whatever, along with migrating to the 64 bit architecture platform and getting to the latest tools release. So, it’s just kind of a real life example of what we see customers, if the right planning is put in place, not everything has to be done in one project. 

Dan Barford: 

You spread things out, build a roadmap, and take advantage of these in smaller chunks, which is actually something that we offer. This is a no cost road mapping workshop, where if you’re interested in talking to us about understanding where you’re currently at with your JD Edwards system, and where you might be able to go, we’ve got an email address, weknowJDE@terillium.com, we’re also going to be exhibiting, so pop into our virtual booth this week, say hello and request some more information and we’d be happy to have a conversation about our roadmap workshop. 

Part Two: Using Organizational Change Management to Fuel Your JDE Initiatives