In May 2023, JD Edwards customers gathered in Dallas, TX, for The JD Edwards Forum at BLUEPRINT 4D, an annual conference where attendees learn from real-life successes and failures, receive candid advice for avoiding mistakes, and understand the best approaches for transforming their people, processes, technology, and strategy.

If you’re interested in upleveling your use of the JD Edwards system, keep reading to learn how a motorcycle retailer, mushroom innovator, and port operator incorporated Orchestrations into their daily processes.

Comoto Holdings: Error Handling

John Phillips, a JD Edwards customer and CNC at Comoto Holdings, shared how the operations team at Comoto decided to incorporate robots into their warehousing system, but they ran into a couple of issues that they used Orchestrator to solve.

The team at Comoto Holdings had to answer the following questions:

How do we develop our system before the robots arrive?

To address this problem, the team ended up selecting Postman, which had a cloud project that was easy to connect and write data from Orchestrator, as long as you were inside the Comoto network.  Postman was easy to connect to JD Edwards an the third-party vendor that Comoto used.

How do we track the orchestration data?

Another issue that needed addressed was the ability to track Orchestration data as Comoto needed to know what data was being sent, if a response was received, error/success codes, and to easily identify the Orchestration and sub-Orchestration that was being used.  To address this problem, Comoto developed a custom application to track and save the JSON data from the Orchestrations and place it into a custom table.

Today, Comoto’s ordering architecture begins with an order placed from one of several websites. Next, the order moves through E1 Order Picks and the 3rd party inventory tote scanning. Then, the E1 Orchestrator connects to a 3rd party warehouse execution system, which coordinates with the robots. The system is working smoothly, thanks to Comoto’s innovation with Orchestrator.

To read more about Comoto Holding’s use of Orchestrator to incorporate robots check out this blog post: How Comoto Holdings Handled Orchestrator Errors.

Monterey Mushrooms: Simple Ways to Use Orchestrations

When Monterey Mushrooms’ Senior Business Analyst and JD Edwards user, Lisa Tran, decided to start learning Orchestrations, she wanted to keep things simple. She began by asking herself and recommends other JD Edwards users take the same approach:

• What routine things do I do that could be automated?
• What problems do people keep asking me to fix?
• How can I be proactive instead of reactive?
• How can I raise awareness of data problems before they cause an issue?
• How can I give access to users for systems we don’t want them in?

From these questions, Lisa came up with several simple orchestrations that make a huge impact on daily functions:

• Purchasing Advanced Pricing
• Commission Management
• EDI Setup
• Full Cost Rollup
• Deleting Stale Reservations
• Notifications Based on Watchlists

For more details about each of these orchestrations, you can read the blog post: Simple Orchestrations with a Big Impact.

If you want to use Orchestrator, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Lisa recommends that JD Edwards Customers start small to find simple but powerful ways to improve your daily processes.

Port of Portland: Improves Employee Access to Online W2s

Evelyn Bian, Senior Business Analyst for Port of Portland, shared how the Port of Portland, a JD Edwards customer, used Orchestrator to improve employee access to online W2s.    The Port of Portland is currently running JDE EnterpriseOne 9.2.3 64-bit, Tools Release Update 23 (9.2.7.2).

Each year, Oracle releases a new W2 BIP template, but it has the same file name as the previous year. When the Port of Portland team would try to update the W2 in the system, prior records disappeared from ESS, which meant payroll was constantly fielding employee requests for older W2s. The Port desired a way to keep prior W2s in ESS, so employees could access and print their own W2s for current and past years. Since most employees were rarely in the JDE system, this solution needed to be easy for anyone to use.

To overcome the challenge, the team built a custom solution using Orchestrator that allows employees to access a PDF of their W2 all on their own through the Employee Self-Service Page.  This solution not only automates the retrieval of the W2 but instructs the user on how to navigate to Submitted Jobs where they can access the W2s.

If you want to know more details about how the Port of Portland’s custom solution was set up and works, check out this blog post: Improving Employee Access to Online W2s with JD Edwards.

Want More?

By learning from the experiences of JD Edwards customers like John Phillips, Lisa Tran, and Evelyn Bian, you can quickly solve issues, avoid failures, and achieve success in your JD Edwards system.  You can view the full BLUEPRINT 4D session, featuring these three speakers, here: JD Edwards Ignite Session.

To hear more JD Edwards customers’ stories like theirs, don’t forget the save the date for BLUEPRINT 4D 2024, which will be back in Dallas, May 7-10, 2024.