At COLLABORATE 19, A.J. Schifano, a Product Manager for Oracle JD Edwards, walked through how the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Orchestrator can help customers thrive in the digital economy.

The Digital Transformation Landscape

The JD Edwards team aims to enable your business to be part of the transformation revolution in the digital world using JD Edwards and Orchestrator. As you know, several tools are available already. Some manifest themselves as Cloud applications, while others are theoretical.

In order to take part in digital transformation, your JD Edwards platform must also transform. Tools updates contribute to this. Even greater, specific features such as Orchestrator and notifications help launch JDE into the digital revolution.

The JD Edwards team understands that your business does not stop. At any given moment, you have products coming in the dock, manufactured goods leaving the dock, the shop floor is busy, and your financials are turning. Everything in your enterprise is moving at a rapid pace.

In order to efficiently monitor all of these interactions and pull data in real time, you need a digital replica of your physical entity—a digital twin. For JD Edwards customers, your ERP system should be a digital twin of your business. Access should be available not only to typical desktop transaction users, but also to higher level executives, third-party systems communicating with JDE, and systems or machines. With that said, you can use Orchestrator and notifications to extend to these participants in digital transformation.

The JD Edwards Digital Platform

The core of the JD Edwards ERP system still exists in the middle of the digital platform. The collection of data remains the same, but this data needs to be stored and reported out for a useful purpose. The dynamics of an ERP system don’t change. The change occurs in the process by which you reach out to other digitally transformational technologies like blockchain, mobile and robotic automation. It would be impossible for JDE to apply the happenings of the entire industry into the next Tools release. Instead, the JDE digital platform boasts Orchestrator as the fundamental component to reach out to all the others. The end result is a set of real applications that you build to represent your digital transformation.

You have the ability to build an orchestration which could create online work orders, automate field operations, evaluate and send out information collected by Internet of Things data, or any number of processes that will streamline your business. All of this can be driven by the digital platform, with little to no code necessary.

You’ve probably heard the approach that is often recommended in regard to people at work—Alert, Analyze, Act. This is the design paradigm that JD Edwards UX One is built upon. The other side of the coin is Detect, Decide, Do. This is the pattern that systems are trained to follow so that humans can let the machine do more of the work. If the computer can detect necessary data and send it to the user immediately, you can eliminate the user’s need to seek out data and streamlined the entire process.

Taking it a step further, when a pattern of behavior is repeated often enough—such as the machine detecting and alerting the user, causing the user to click a certain link—eventually, you can teach the machine to click that link itself in order to complete the pattern. This emancipates the end user to creatively problem-solve, invent, and more.

How Orchestrator Plays a Part

How does Orchestrator fit into this? Orchestrator plugs the JD Edwards user into Internet of Things (IoT) to get data and kick instruction back out to devices. Alternative user interfaces, process simplification, integration, and intelligent ERP are each able to participate in orchestration.

Orchestrations that go in and out of JDE service any type of helpful activity. If you are wondering what a helpful orchestration would be to implement for your users, keep your ears open for any type of dialogue like this:

• “I can’t believe I have to do this again!”
• “Why am I doing this? A robot could do it.”
• “I don’t get paid for this.”
• “Can’t we just [send/receive] this information to that other system?”

If the definition of a service is an act of helpful activity, help, or aid, Orchestration is the ultimate (micro)service. You can use orchestrations to help you accomplish any goal—both at the simplest level and the most complex. Essentially, you are building an application programming interface into your JD Edwards system each time you create an orchestration, and every API is available for third-party servicing.

1. There are several patterns that can be used within Orchestrator:
2. Asking JD Edwards a question and getting an answer in return
3. Asking anybody a question and getting an answer in return
4. Telling JD Edwards to do something
5. Telling anybody to do something

The term “anybody” in these scenarios refers to anybody that has a published REST service that you can call on. You can view demonstrations of each of these patterns below:

Asking JD Edwards a Question

Asking Anybody a Question

Tell JD Edwards to Do Something

Tell Anybody to Do Something

The Toolbox for Building Orchestrations

The image below shows the complete toolbox that is available to help users build and leverage their own orchestrations:

Integration and digital transformation have the ability to reduce friction and enhance results within your operation with unprecedented success. You will be able to take the best features of JDE and of other interfaces to run a more efficient business.