During Quest Forum Digital Event: JD Edwards Week, Jeff Erickson, Senior Director of Product Management, presented on how you can reimagine software updates with Continuous Adoption.

Erickson focused on three main topics:

• Drivers behind Continuous Adoption
• Continuous delivery and adoption considerations
• Customers embracing Continuous Adoption

Continuous Adoption & Innovation Drivers

Continuous Adoption and innovation drivers fall into three categories:

1. Business
2. Technology
3. Competition

Planned business drivers include process standardization, consolidated visibility, security, workforce engagement, global expansion, cost reduction, and agility.

Technology drivers include robotic process automation, personalization framework, internet of things, mobile, chatbots, autonomous database, predictive analytics, oracle cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, hybrid clouds, and elasticity.

Competitive drivers include a rapid time to market, non-traditional business models, and a desire for first-mover status in their industry.

Innovation is easy to budget for. You can allot cash to bring in consultants and to purchase new software and expect a return on your investment. However, it’s difficult to measure the cost of doing nothing. The risk of maintaining the status quo increases daily. According to McKinsey & Company, “Automation of Knowledge work has a potential economic impact of $5-7 trillion by 2025.” Automation removes friction of error-prone processes and creates new opportunities within the workforce. Innovation is key for businesses to thrive.

Continuous Innovation Partnership

Six years ago, Oracle started down the path to Continuous Delivery. This agile delivery model provides incremental quarterly innovation to the JD Edwards application and releases on the most current code-line. In partnership with Continuous Delivery, Continuous Adoption is a regular cadence established by customers and partners to consume the innovations being delivered, quickly realize business benefits, and transform their digital business.

Continuous Adoption Considerations

JD Edwards moved to Continuous Innovation with 9.2. Customers can plan and schedule an adoption model that aligns with this delivery. JDE recommends a regular cadence of updates.

When you upgrade to EnterpriseOne 9.2, you will:

• Digitally transform your operations
• Enable innovation with the latest JD Edwards application and technology features
• React rapidly to new business trends, regulatory requirements, and technology trends
• Reduce risk with access to the latest updates for infrastructure security and compliance updates

Legacy Updates

Customers often ask how this new delivery is different from the past. Traditionally, the ERP industry released costly big bang upgrades that took up to 36 months. Customers ran into product fatigue during the upgrade, and once the upgrades were completed, the vendor stopped offering support within a few years. This caused increased costs through customizations and consultants. Legacy upgrades didn’t add value or adaptability, and customers increased technical debt and risk over time.

The Paradigm Shift

Oracle JD Edwards 9.2 is a modern and dynamic digital platform that enables process automation, personalization, cutting-edge technology, and competitive advantage for businesses. This is no longer the backend system of years past. Now, JDE is an enabler for innovation. Customers are solving business problems with JDE like never before.

To move your company to this paradigm shift of continuous innovation, you need to consider the following:

• Executive-level support
• Value of continuous innovation
• Change management
• Organizational change tolerance
• Level of effort

Continuous Innovation Model

With Continuous Innovation, organizations react to market changes when needed, get a quick return on investment, avoid technical “debt” and security risks, and increase the value of JD Edwards with Continuous Adoption.

JDE offers several motilities to enable Continuous Innovation:

• Simplified Upgrade – Minimize retrofit during upgrades.
• Object Usage Tracking – Is your custom code used?
• Impact Analysis – Create test plans based on usage.
• Customization Object Analyzer – Expedite retrofit efforts.
• De-customizer – Identify custom code that may be a candidate for personalization.

Customers Embracing Continous Adoption

Roy Jorgensen Associates

Roy Jorgensen Associates eliminated modifications for continuous innovation of 9.2 features. They moved to continuous innovation in order to reduce customizations, access all the latest fixes, and fully take advantage of new 9.2 features. This move resulted in a new paradigm of no customizations, UX One, and personalization framework to eliminate modifications, incremental updates to applications in productions, and reduced risk of potential disruption from a future major upgrade.

Ford Meter Box

While other customers are just now getting a plan in place for Continous Adoption and innovation, Ford Meter Box is in the trenches doing it. When upgrading to 9.2, Ford Meter Box has adopted the latest Tools release and the latest Apps ESUs and components in less than three weeks. Taking advantage of Continous Adoption on a regular basis has been a major value-added for Ford Meter Box by helping them reduce both cost and long-term risk. They are current in taking on patches and Tools and plan to do so quarterly moving forward.

Getting Started with Continous Adoption

To start your move to continuous innovation, Erickson recommends the following six steps:

1. Review product updates, new features, and tools at learnjde.com
2. Embrace continuous adoption culture
3. Evangelize the value for IT & LOB
4. Engage your partner
5. Network within a user group
6. Review use cases in our new tool