Artificial intelligence may dominate technology conversations, but delivering meaningful business value doesn’t always require the latest innovation. Sometimes, the greatest opportunities are already available within an organization’s existing enterprise software.

At INFOCUS 2026, Joe Hebner shared how his team at Tredegar is using JD Edwards EnterpriseOne tools to streamline operations, improve data accuracy, reduce customizations, and eliminate unnecessary work. In his session, “You don’t need AI to deliver value to the enterprise,” Hebner demonstrated how relatively simple enhancements can produce substantial results without major development projects or AI investments.

Finding Value in the Existing JD Edwards Toolbox

Tredegar operates globally across high-performance films and aluminum extrusion manufacturing. Hebner supports the high-performance films business, which operates manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania and China.

The company runs JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and recently moved to Release 26. Its commitment to staying code current has made annual upgrades an established business practice, with users increasingly accustomed to testing, planned downtime, and continuous improvement.

That foundation allows Hebner’s team to take advantage of existing JD Edwards capabilities, including personalized grids, queries, composed pages, Café One, form extensions, orchestrations, and EnterpriseOne Search.

Rather than pursuing technology for its own sake, Hebner focuses on identifying everyday frustrations and finding practical solutions. His guiding principle is straightforward: If a user must click more than three times to accomplish something, there may be an opportunity to improve the process.

Eliminating Manual Work with Grids, Queries, and Personalized Forms

Some of Tredegar’s most effective improvements have come from tools that many JD Edwards users already have available.

Hebner frequently encounters employees scrolling through extensive grids, manually searching for information, or exporting data into Excel. Simple adjustments, such as renaming columns, freezing important fields, and adding information through form extensions, can dramatically improve usability.

One procurement employee routinely exported purchase orders into Excel to identify open orders, late deliveries, and upcoming receipts. After observing her workflow, Hebner created Café One views that displayed the relevant information directly within JD Edwards. The employee could access what she needed without maintaining a separate spreadsheet.

Personalized forms have also helped address data quality problems.

During development of a manufacturing report, Tredegar discovered inconsistent maintenance work order entries. Employees were entering descriptions in different fields or overlooking required information entirely.

Rather than correcting the reporting process, Hebner simplified the underlying data entry experience. He created a personalized form containing the three fields maintenance employees needed: equipment number, description, and category code.

The simplified form was added to their composed page, improving consistency and completeness while reducing unnecessary interaction with the application.

Reducing Customizations with Form Extensions and Orchestrations

Form extensions provide another opportunity to improve JD Edwards business value without traditional customization.

Hebner described a purchasing employee who repeatedly navigated between applications to retrieve item search text needed for purchase order management. Adding that information through a form extension took approximately 45 seconds, followed by roughly two hours of change management.

The improvement now saves the employee an estimated two hours each week.

Tredegar also uses orchestrations to automate repetitive activities. One example allows employees to add a standard item to a bill of materials by selecting an item and branch from a composed page instead of manually opening, editing, and saving the bill.

Another combines form extensions and orchestrations to manage quality holds. Previously, employees occasionally released a lot in the lot master but failed to update the corresponding item location hold. A new action handles the necessary updates together, reducing inconsistent inventory statuses.

These improvements demonstrate how supported JD Edwards functionality can replace custom development while making processes more reliable.

Transforming Maintenance Purchase Order Approvals

One of Hebner’s most comprehensive examples involved maintenance purchasing.

Tredegar’s preventive maintenance process automatically generated purchase orders that immediately entered the plant manager’s approval queue. However, maintenance managers often needed to review parts, pricing, and scheduling before approval.

Consequently, purchase orders were repeatedly returned for corrections.

The team evaluated Speed Status Update but found that it bypassed the required approval process. Instead, they developed a solution combining five JD Edwards user-defined object (UDO) capabilities: composed pages, orchestrations, logic extensions, form extensions, and Café One.

The new workflow allows maintenance managers to review purchase orders at a designated status before submitting them for approval through the standard application.

Logic extensions control button visibility based on the application version, ensuring the additional action appears only in the appropriate workflow. Hebner emphasized that the logic extension must be available to all relevant users because form extensions are not version-specific.

The result has been significant. Maintenance managers can review orders efficiently, and plant managers receive purchase orders that have already been validated.

Hebner reported that the maintenance manager considers the solution among the most valuable improvements delivered to the department.

Using EnterpriseOne Search to Prevent Manufacturing Downtime

EnterpriseOne Search has delivered particularly compelling results for Tredegar’s maintenance operations.

Maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) items often have internal item numbers that employees don’t recognize. Relevant information may instead appear across item descriptions, search text, and manufacturer abbreviations.

Previously, locating parts required multiple searches using wildcards and different fields.

Hebner implemented EnterpriseOne Search to search across multiple fields simultaneously and display related information, including inventory availability, open purchase orders, equipment parts lists, and work order commitments.

The tool also helps employees identify where parts are already allocated and whether materials issued to another work order might be available for an urgent repair.

Its value became clear when a manufacturing line experienced equipment failure. A replacement part was unavailable from the supplier for two to three days. Using the search, the maintenance team identified another machine that used the same component.

They retrieved the part and restored production within a few hours rather than waiting days for delivery.

The same approach helps master data employees validate item configurations, compare general ledger codes, review bills of materials, and inspect alternate routings without repeatedly navigating between applications.

Connecting Manufacturing Systems and Improving Visibility

Tredegar is also expanding its use of widgets and orchestrations to bring information from multiple systems into JD Edwards.

One widget combines JD Edwards inventory records with programmable logic controller (PLC) data from manufacturing equipment. Operators can compare recorded inventory quantities against actual silo measurements, helping them anticipate material changes and avoid inventory discrepancies.

Another integration connects ServiceNow safety incidents with JD Edwards maintenance work orders.

When a safety concern requires maintenance, an orchestration validates the equipment information, creates the work order, records the related incident, and returns the work order number to ServiceNow.

This creates a connected process with validated information rather than relying on spreadsheets or duplicate manual entry.

Building a Continuous Improvement Strategy

Hebner’s examples reinforce an important distinction: delivering enterprise value doesn’t necessarily require a large project.

Small enhancements can reduce technical debt, improve data quality, eliminate repetitive tasks, and strengthen user adoption. Supported UDOs can also reduce the development, testing, and retrofit work associated with future upgrades.

Equally important is understanding how employees actually work. Hebner repeatedly emphasized the value of observing users rather than waiting for formal enhancement requests. Employees often accept inefficient processes because they don’t realize better options exist.

His goal is to deliver something valuable to the business every month, even while larger initiatives remain underway.

For JD Edwards organizations exploring AI, the lesson isn’t to abandon emerging technology. It’s to recognize that existing capabilities can deliver measurable improvements today.

The most valuable innovation may be the one that solves a problem employees have learned to live with.

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