As part of Quest’s 2019 Orchestrator Week, representatives from Martin Marietta spoke about how to create an enhanced user experience with JD Edwards by leveraging tools like UX One, Orchestrator, and social networking.

The many people behind Martin Marietta, one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, understand that the key to growth in this fast-paced economy is technology. At Martin Marietta, the IT team accommodates and accelerates business growth using Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne UX One, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Orchestrator, and social networking. Together, the three resources provide seamless automation and the ability to showcase a 360-degree view to customers and sales representatives.

About Martin Marietta

Martin Marietta is a U.S.-based company and a leading supplier of aggregates and heavy-side building materials used in infrastructure, nonresidential, and residential construction projects. Recently debuting at No. 57 on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Companies in the world, Martin Marietta, a member of the S&P 500 Index, employs more than 8,500 employees at operations spanning 26 states, Canada, and the Bahamas.

How Martin Marietta Created an Enhanced User Experience

Strategies and Goals for Growth

Martin Marietta is committed to growth. It is their aim to be both the vendor of choice and the preferred customer. In this spirit, Martin Marietta leadership has three goals:

1. Simplify
2. Standardize
3. Transform

The leadership team understands that technology needs to be the enabler to reach these goals. Here is how Martin Marietta put these goals into action:

Goal 1: Successfully build and deploy Customer Relations Management functions using JD Edwards 9.2 tools like the Internet of Things (IoT), UX One, and Application Development Framework. Integrate with social media for customer news and sales team collaboration. Build IoT functions and eliminate phone calls and multiple touchpoints.

Goal 2: Successfully replace SalesForce.com, Microsoft Excel, and other solutions. Provide a single centralized platform with 360 views for customers and sales reps. Make all views possible within JD Edwards.

Goal 3: Deploy JD Edwards CRM on mobile devices to provide all capabilities and views at the sales teams’ hands to increase effectiveness and productivity.

Challenges Faced

Martin Marietta identified the barriers and challenges as well. They pointed to a complex architecture, data silos, too many points of failure, and a lack of enterprise mobility features as challenges. The company considered the disparate systems in place as a barrier to creating the customer 360-degree view.

Leadership directed IT members to think big and outside the box in utilizing technology to address these challenges.

Martin Marietta’s Recommendations

Martin Marietta came up with several recommendations for the approach to creating an enhanced user experience through UX One, Orchestrator, and social networking:

• Manage by exception and establish tolerance levels. For example, set floor prices and ceiling prices so approvals can move quickly.
• Operate with a “push and pull” philosophy. Instead of organizing information for sales representatives to log in and access, push important information to save time and lead priorities. Information also needs to be available for pulling for sales reps and customers who may want to take a deeper dive into the material.
• Adopt the model for alert, analyze and act. With this model, UX One drives users to be productive as quickly as possible by displaying the most important decision-making data in one location.
• Create a more visual experience for users.
• Offer personalizations and extensions to help sales representatives move and build widgets to present information as they prioritize it.
• Partner with Oracle and Birlasoft to make the journey. Birlasoft, an Oracle Platinum Partner and an Oracle Cloud Select Partner, has a longstanding relationship with Oracle. Birlasoft has built competencies and service offerings to assist customers in their Cloud journeys.

JD Edwards Enabled Features

During the presentation, the Martin Marietta team showed off some of the features that JD Edwards enabled:

• Charts with customer data
• Summaries dynamically linked to grids
• Maps with pin-drop functionality
  • Team members can drop a pin instead of entering an address. This is helpful when a job address is not yet available. Martin Marietta uses this function to calculate tax in advance and eliminate later tax corrections and credit rebuilds.
• Individual landing pages for salesforce members
• Integrations to third-party applications
  • Orchestrator functionality supports integrations to third-party applications, custom programs and more. Martin Marietta uses this to access an external address web site to respond to internal service requests. For example, users can call a business function, add region and date, and the price will be “fetched” automatically.

“Salesforce in terms of CRM has a lot of bells and whistles. When it comes to bringing all the data together, though, there are too many interfaces that we would need to build. It would be too much effort and overhead. It becomes impossible. We were able to enter it all with Customer 360 however and put it on a tablet in front of a salesperson. It became a huge hit with our salesforce and our users.”

-Krishna Muthuperumal, Martin Marietta

Lessons Learned

The Martin Marietta team called their implementation “hugely successful” to date. The primary win for Martin Marietta lies in the power of data that can be accessed and leveraged in real-time. The team came up with advice for those who are ready for the journey:

• Implement change management. It is a challenge to get people who are married to Salesforce or any other software/applications to transition.
• Limit the number of watchlists on a composite page. There is no magic number. Consider the variables, though, of the number of tables, size of tables and the costs associated with each. Consider sending watchlists in a separate link so your transactional processes are not impacted.
• If you have more than four or five tables, you might have performance degradation. Avoid the complexity of table joins with UDO components and watchlists.
• An absolute must: dedicate servers for watchlists. These are useful tools but do not let it interfere with transactional processing.
• Create standards for UDOs. Once people fall in love, it is hard to break up. Manage the UDO.
• Think about the total cost of ownership.
• Integrate Google Maps JavaScript to create a useful tool for your sales team.
• Embed a Twitter timeline with HTML/JavaScript to make the favorite social media tool quickly accessible.
• Don’t go it alone. Partner with Oracle and Birlasoft to make the journey.

To learn more about how Martin Marietta leveraged UX One, Orchestrator, and social networking to create an enhanced user experience in JD Edwards, check out the full 2019 Orchestrator Week presentation attached below. To access the rest of the recordings from Orchestrator Week, check out the Orchestrator Week landing page.