At COLLABORATE 19, Jeff Erickson, Senior Director of JD Edwards Product Management, presented the JD Edwards Tools roadmap. Erickson explained that the concept of continuous innovation that drives this roadmap also drives future innovation and success for organizations.

Continuous innovation has altered the way business technology companies deliver “the next big thing.” A new delivery cadence has organizations regularly receiving enhancements on both the applications and tools sides to evolve business control and agility. Given the rate of continuous advancement, Erickson encourages organizations to remain up to date about what the digital platform can equip their businesses to do. As Erikson cautions, if your business is not considering how to maximize existing and emerging innovation, your competitors might be.

JD Edwards Tools Roadmap and Strategy

Leveraging the Enablement Framework

Orchestrator has been a major area of investment for JD Edwards over the past five years and has enabled the flexibility of organizations to execute and leverage their business data, rules, and logic outside of EnterpriseOne in different ways. It allows businesses to interact with the digital economy with quick integration – driving real-time business processes out of JD Edwards. Proactive notifications keep workers in touch and informed about critical events even when they are away or not signed on to EnterpriseOne.

With an eye on industry trends and the user community, Erickson reports that Orchestrator and Notifications continue to improve with these emerging enhancements:

• New “Version 3” orchestrations with enhanced output
• Open API standards-based discovery of orchestrations, inputs, and outputs
• XML inputs and outputs
• Increased visibility and control of orchestrations through the Message Center including report attachments
• Orchestrator Monitoring to see the health of orchestrations at a glance with improved diagnostics
• Real-time orchestrations to launch orchestrations from a table event
• Studio UI improvements intended to lower maintenance costs

Leveraging the Extensibility Framework

While customizing software was a major selling point 20 years ago, the industry today is focused on tailoring the system to your organization’s needs through simplified processes for configuration, personalization, and extensibility. While customization still has its place for specific use cases, extending EnterpriseOne without touching the base code reduces or eliminates existing barriers to staying current through continuous innovation.

Erickson shares enhanced extensibility built based on how users have been customizing their software and user feedback. For example, to address business view fields that were not on every form and required customization to be added, users can now drag and drop those fields onto forms without customization. Similarly, there have been fields on the table that were not on the business view. The next maintenance pack for the tables that are part of the business view will allow fields to be added without requiring customization.

Has your organization retired customizations using these capabilities? Erickson recommends that this process builds from starting with your organization’s top five customizations to retire. This is a less daunting option than creating a plan for a two-year project to get rid of all of your customizations. Leveraging the extensibility framework for your business empowers your organization with increased control and agility while continuing to remove barriers to continuous innovation.

Leveraging Value at the Core

Enablement and extensibility frameworks are of great value when what they are built upon is maintained and advanced. Thus, JD Edwards continues to invest in the system administration enablement framework toward increasing automation, simplification, and lowering the total cost of ownership through these investment areas:

• 64-bit Enablement: With minimal impact to business processes and data, all components of EnterpriseOne are now 64-bit enabled to maximize the current JD Edwards architecture, future proof your JD Edwards investment, avoid hardware and software obsolescence, and improve performance.
• Decustomizer Analysis Report, Object Tracking, and Impact Analysis: Do you ever have questions about what you have already customized or what customizations you could retire? The Decustomizer Analysis Report is a planned ESU intended to identify what can be retired from with the current frameworks further supporting your organization staying current and achieving quick success. Combined with Object Tracking and Impact Analysis, organizations can better prioritize customizations that when returned to vanilla through extensions would yield higher returns on investment.
• Upgrade Simplification: To reduce the need for retrofitting and to simplify the upgrade process, JD Edwards now delivers a code current target twice yearly. This simplification removes significant time and effort from the upgrade process of applying tools releases, ESUs, and special instructions. Moving to cloud infrastructure is also simplified to a one-step process.
• Automated Reference Architecture for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): While preserving identical functionality from on-premise to the cloud, there are unique benefits to moving JD Edwards to OCI including automated provisioning, reference architecture, and automated high availability.
• Service Enablement of Server Manager: Coming late 2019, Orchestrator will assume services as Server Manager. This change brings increased flexibility and simplification with a new endpoint, the ability to leverage the same skill sets already available using orchestrations, and to build out automation on the Dev Ops side.

These enhancements, combined with the upcoming simplification of the Development Client and automation through DevOps enablement, continue to “future-proof” your JD Edwards environment to equip your business for today and the future.

Additional Resources

COLLABORATE 20 will take place April 19-23, 2020 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada! Don’t miss this chance to share inspiration, insights, and solutions with your peers, vendors, and the Oracle team! Register before March 6, 2020, to take advantage of Early Bird pricing.

Save the date for Quest Experience Week! This free, four-day event is jam-packed with digital education designed to provide both strategic insight and how-to-education for Oracle users of all levels. Each day is dedicated to a different product and begins with a keynote followed by afternoon breakout sessions. Join us November 12-15, 2019, for conference-quality education from the comfort of your desk!

• Cloud Day: November 12
• Database Day: November 13
• PeopleSoft Day: November 14
• JD Edwards Day: November 15

If you’re looking for more JD Edwards content, join us next year at INFOCUS 20, the premier deep-dive JD Edwards focused event of the year! The event will take place August 25-27, 2020 in Denver, Colorado. Keep an eye out for more information on this event!