As part of Quest’s JD Edwards Orchestrator Week 2019, Dan Holverson, Director of IT at Clayton County Water Authority, spoke about how CCWA leveraged Orchestrator to automate integrations, requisition release, and PO processing.

About Clayton County Water Authority

Clayton County Water Authority (CCWA), located in Morrow, Georgia, has been recognized throughout the world for its sustainability practices. Named one of the “Top Water Wise Communities” in the U.S., this company is famous for its model of using wetlands to recharge the water supply during droughts. CCWA serves over 80,000 residential and commercial customers, including the Atlanta airport. Company leaders are focused on strategic planning and a standard framework to ensure Best in Class utility.

CCWA has been using JD Edwards on-prem since 2002. The last upgrade took place in October 2018 as the company moved to virtualized Windows 2016/SQL 2016 environment, Apps 9.2.2, and Tools 9.2.2.5. With the upgrade, key leaders hoped to increase efficiency and effectiveness, and they determined that automating requisitions for purchase orders would help with this endeavor.

Purchase Order Processing at CCWA

The Old Way: Manual

The former purchase order process was clunky and slow. End users would create requisitions for the approval routing process. Once final approval was reached, the end user would release requisition to purchase order. Then, the finance department would print all POs and distributed them as required.

With 13 different locations throughout Clayton County, these POs would either be placed in the mail or, more often, someone from the remote location would drive to the primary location to pick up the PO. They would then drive back to their office, scan the paper to create a PDF that could be attached to an email, and then send it to the supplier or vendor.

This process was incredibly inefficient.

The New Way: Orchestrator

The new purchase order process is much more streamlined. End users still create requisitions that will travel through the approval routing process. Once final approval has been reached, the new orchestration process releases the requisition to a purchase order, then emails the originator on the requisition a PDF file of the purchase order. This eliminates the steps of printing the PO and the driving back and forth between locations. To completely automate the process, CCWA placed the orchestrations for the PO automation on the scheduler that runs every 30 minutes.

Requisition Release at CCWA

Business is better with automated requisitions. CCWA claims the automated process is extremely beneficial to the overall business. End users no longer have to check the status of requisitions that can be turned into purchase orders, and the finance department doesn’t waste time printing and distributing POs. Likewise, representatives from other locations don’t have to drive to the corporate office, which can take as long as an hour one-way. POs can be extremely time-sensitive, so the expedited process is beneficial in numerous ways.

The flow chart below shows a brief overview of the process.

Additional Processes Automated with Orchestrator

In addition to automated PO processing and requisition release, CCWA uses JDE integrations and orchestrations including:

• Equipment Master – JDE to Cityworks
• Equipment hours – Cityworks to JDE
• Capital Work Orders – JDE to Cityworks
• Maintenance Work Orders – Cityworks to JDE
• Work Order Parts – JDE to Cityworks
• Work Order Costs – JDE to Cityworks