At #INFOCUS17, Lyle Ekdahl and other speakers showed some useful new capabilities in JD Edwards. Customers I spoke with are excited about increasing productivity with UX One role-based content, simplifying updates with Object Tracking, cutting costs by replacing customizations with new off-the-shelf capabilities.

Did you know that since the October 2015 release of JD Edwards 9.2, Oracle has released seven new Feature Pack releases? These releases contain more than 180 enhancements. Oracle plans to continue delivering two to three updates per year (plus cumulative updates). Furthermore, Oracle has extended its support commitment to at least 2028 for EnterpriseOne (at least 2025 for World software).

With that kind of investment momentum and commitment from Oracle, what kinds updates should you plan on evaluating and installing? Oracle’s JD Edwards product team is investing in three key development areas.

• Personalized user experiences for adoption and productivity
• Industry process effectiveness that extends beyond commodity (horizontal) ERP processes
• Digital technologies for business transformation: mobility, IoT, collaboration, and Cloud enablement

For example, UX One is delivering role based content. To date, Oracle has delivered content for 50 user roles covering 23 functional areas. Role-based process flows fit the way many users actually work. In addition, UX One enables personalization and delivers an non-traditional user interface model: Alert > Analyze > Act. Lyle calls this action-oriented, notification-powered user engagement model “ERP with a pulse.”

What this means to users is that with off-the-shelf updates, JD Edwards is helping users to work smarter with greater productivity. For IT staff, low-code forms simplify personalization and reduce customization efforts. So you will want to make plans evaluate upcoming updates and potentially implement some of the new role-based capabilities.

Industry-specific capabilities have long distinguished JD Edwards from cloud and on-premises applications options. One possible new product previewed at INFOCUS is Joint Venture Management. This brings to new industries some of the approaches proven in oil & gas and other natural resources industries. That enables companies to team up and account for joint capital investments, varying operating responsibilities, and shared financial results. You can expect that Oracle’s JD Edwards team will continue delivering new industry-specific capabilities to help your organization work more effectively and remain agile in changing business environments.

Digital business is another important area of long-term investment by Oracle. As we have shared in previous blog posts, Oracle aims to help companies to transform into agile enterprises that serve customers effectively in the face of new and digitally-native competitors. Some of the technologies JD Edwards uses to empower this vision are the Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, collaboration, and cloud enablement. The Orchestrator (formerly known as IoT Orchestrator) combines remove device and external-to-server system connectivity with process management. JD Edwards’ 80-plus mobile applications are gaining additional capabilities to make them more useful “wherever and whenever,” for a range of user roles.

In sum, Oracle is continuing to release new updates several times a year. Your organization should make recurring plans to review these updates with user audiences, prioritize deployment of most-useful new capabilities, and implement updates that may enable increased revenues, reduce costs, and improve productivity.

Want to learn more? Oracle has put together a variety of educational content assets at www.LearnJDE.com, many of which focus on what is new. To learn more from customers and partners about how to use new capabilities, visit Quest’s Content Library. And, plan to join us next year at our Oracle COLLABORATE conference, COLLABORATE 18 and INFOCUS 18!