During INFOCUS 20, AJ Schifano, Product Manager for Oracle JD Edwards, identified five JDE customers who are using Orchestrator in new and useful ways to help achieve digital transformation.

Customers Using Orchestrator to Drive JDE Innovation

Customer #1: Hamilton Telecommunications

Hamilton Telecommunications is a diversified communications and technology service provider based in Aurora, Nebraska. Their JD Edwards footprint is fairly typical, with JD Edwards at the core surrounded by Oracle CRM, custom apps, eLation, Kronos Cloud, and ERP governance. The team is only made up of two to three people, so they have limited bandwidth for huge IT projects.

Business Problem

Due to a turnover rate, Hamilton HR spends a lot of time maintaining master information in JDE. Accurate and timely updates are important for serving employees and meeting external requirements for the business.

Orchestrated Solutions

1. HR Benefit Enrollment: Implemented an automated process that enrolls eligible new employees in non-mandatory benefit plans, based on designated criteria. Allows for mass updating of enrollment information and ensures accurate information is being sent to vendors.
2. HR Termination Processes: Created an automated process that updates employee records for ex-employees after their last paycheck, ensuring the accuracy of master data and removing sensitive information no longer needed.
3. Workforce BI Solution: Created an automated process that sends new and updated employee demographic information to an external repository for use within a workforce management Hub that incorporates other enterprise data. This helps Hamilton meet data quality and training requirements and ensures contractual obligations.

Thoughts and Lessons Learned

• Work backward from form request used for updating data, then figure out how to get/calculate needed inputs.
• Use custom business views to accommodate needs for finding updates to tables.
• Incorporate Query UDO’s within a request to supplement processing needs requirements and flexibility.
• Do your due diligence on security considerations.
• Provide user groups with UDO audit mechanisms they can use to validate information.
  • Query/Grid/CafeOne/Notification
  • Helps foster engagement, ownership, and accountability
• Test at every step.

Customer #2: Eastern Propane & Oil

Easter Propane & Oil is a full-service oil company serving 90,000 customers in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Headquartered in Rochester, New Hampshire, the company is the sixteenth largest propane retailer in the U.S. They are family-owned and operated, and their JDE system includes 450 users across 12 locations.

Project Background

Field Service workers often hand off inventory for maintenance work from one truck to another. They wanted their internal system to track the movement of inventory, so they built a mobile app.

• Following Eastern’s initial roll-out of Oracle Field Service (OFS), it became painfully apparent they needed up-to-the-minute accuracy for truck inventory.
• Mobile service technicians need to transfer parts between trucks in the field.
• Transactions needed to be reflected in OFS and also in the system of record—JD Edwards.
• Since this customization couldn’t be done in native OFS, they needed a plug-in to be invoked from OFS and ultimately call JDE Orchestrations, which would facilitate the inventory transfer.

Business Problem

• The legacy service mobile application allowed inventory to go negative.
• Service techs could physically move inventory without bothering to use the legacy inventory transfer process.
• The inventory would eventually be fixed by inside people days after the transfer took place.
• This resulted in a lot of additional work, billing delays, and late payments.

Orchestrated Solution

The team used Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service to build the UI for Inventory Transfer Mobile Application.

Project Benefits

• Reduced time to invoice for service
• Reduced troubleshooting inventory issues
• Increase in accuracy of inventory
• Reduced customer calls/increased customer satisfaction

Lessons Learned

• Make sure orchestration responses do not contain escape characters (connectors)
• May have to update HTML to ensure proper formatting (blank spaces)

Customer #3: The Anschutz Corporation

Founded in 1965, Anschutz Corporation has holdings in entertainment, exploration, parks and resorts, media, film, and philanthropy. This global company has a footprint in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Their JDE EnterpriseOne system covers over 450 legal entities, 7 time zones, 9 fiscal periods, and over 30 accounting departments comprised of 400 financial module users.

Business Problem

• There was no automated process to validate bank account data prior to making a vendor payment.
• Manual process: Individual account data is vetted via a manual request to add/change bank account data. TAC sends an email to the email on file when a vendor bank account is changed.
• This provided an opening for fraudulent activity to occur.

Orchestrated Solution

Create an Automated Bank Account Validation with the following steps …

• Service request: REST connection to Wells Fargo
• Custom Groovy step to request the bank account status/ownership
• Requires mutual certificate authentication
• With 9.2.4.4, Orchestrator allows for a definition of a digital certificate to be entered in REST connection
• The orchestration is called via a Form Extension

Bank Account Validation Results

• First three-month timeframe: 300+ accounts validated
  • Account Validated – 70.3 percent
  • Account Did Not Validate – 11.4 percent
  • Identifying Data Not Available – 18.3 percent
• Recent results: 600+ accounts validated
  • Accounts Validated – 81.6 percent
  • Account Did Not Validate – 4/3 percent
  • Identifying Data Not Available – 14.1 percent

Benefits

An automated solution saves an undetermined amount of time and money by reducing the risk of fraudulent activity.

Customer #4: JB Poindexter

JB Poindexter is a privately held manufacturing company. The team is made up of 6,500 people and brings in a combined revenue of $1.6 billion. Corporate is divided into eight business units primarily engaged in the automotive sector, producing commercial truck bodies, step-vans, service utility trucks, funeral coaches, limousines, vehicle cargo management systems, pick-up truck bed covers, and accessories.

Business Problem

• A single business unit was creating hundreds of new parts weekly plus related bill of materials, routings, and attachments (media objects).
• Sometimes it made 3000 new records daily.
• It takes ½ JDE Developer FTE to import that due to data issues and communication issues between business owners and developers.
• “I’ve counted 378 related emails that I was cc-ed on in a year; 39 in the last month.” – Boyan Vukichevich, Director, App Dev
• Due to a huge number of data issues, a standard ETL process would not be a good solution.

Orchestrated Solution

Automated Parts, BoMs, Routing, and Media Objects

• Get new Item Number>Enter BoM>routing>Upload Attachment

“We did the project internally, but it would be almost impossible without ACBM Solutions from JDExcelerator”

-Boyan Vukichevich, Director, App Dev

Pioneer #5: A Manufacturing Company

A Manufacturing Company is a customer and consumer-focused packaging partner that leads the market in innovation execution. Its values are rooted in sustainability and social responsibility. There are 3,300 employees spanning 2 countries and 19 plants with annual sales amounting to $1.3 billion. 

Business Problem

Provide customers with a self-service way to create and manage their orders.

Orchestrated Solution

A customer-facing storefront portal with …

• Full suite of real-time self-service and reporting capabilities
• Item inquiry, Inventory inquiry
• Shipment and invoice inquiry
• Place orders, Track orders
• Manage production and shipment orders