Karen Brown, Senior Principal Product Manager for JD Edwards, showed how User Defined Objects (UDOs) work as the cornerstone of personalization and extensibility frameworks and enable users to personalize and work at maximum effectiveness and efficiency. She presented several practical use cases for UDOs in Financials.
Do you remember when you first implemented JD Edwards? At the time, you likely raved over the increased efficiency and ease of use. Over time, however, you may have recognized areas of your system that felt redundant or unneeded. Since JD Edwards is created for a mass audience and not your unique role or company, there could be unnecessary features and missteps in certain processes. Instead of living with these annoyances, the product team is sharing quick and easy changes you can make to tailor your system to you.
With User Defined Objects, you can solve problems and questions like:
- What do I need to know right now?
- What do I need to do first, second, and third?
- This application has to be easier to work with!
- I need more information.
- Can’t the system do this for me auto-magically?
UDOs in Financials: Pre-Configured Notifications
The first question that UDOs can help you solve is, “What do I need to know right now?” You can leverage UDOs to help digitally transform your organization with notifications.
Do any of these thoughts feel true for you?
- “I want to stay informed and act fast.”
- “I desire a proactive push of information or need for action.”
- “What if the system automatically ran the queries that I run every day and then informed me of anything I need to be aware of?”
- “What if the system could text me when conditions occur that need my attention?”
With EnterpriseOne notifications, you can transform your thoughts and abilities. Notifications can help users:
- Increase awareness of what’s going on and what’s important
- Know how to leverage the financial notifications JDE has delivered
- Reduce friction, simplify, and improve business processes
There are several pre-configured notifications delivered within JD Edwards for financial users.
Consider this use case:
“I am a Lease Accounting Manager and I need to know when I have leases that the monthly journal entries have not been created for. I would usually need to navigate to the Amortization Schedule application and run a query. Of course, I have to be online to do this. I’d really like to be told this is a problem instead of having to specifically go to the application to find it out.”
JD Edwards already provides a pre-configured notification just for this purpose.
How does it work?
- The system administrator shares the appropriate pre-configured notifications delivered by JD Edwards (or the business analyst creates new notifications based upon your needs)
- Users subscribe to the ones they want
- Managers assign subscriptions to their group
- Users manage their notifications
For a demo of the pre-configured notification, check out the video below.
UDOs in Financials: UX One Role-Based Landing Pages
The second question that UDOs can help you solve is “What do I need to do first, second, and third?” You can transform your user experience with UX One role-based landing pages.
When you create role-based landing pages, you can:
- Focus on conditions requiring attention
- Analyze data through graphical charts
- Navigate to source applications to take action
JD Edwards empowers you to leverage 52 roles delivered for rapid deployment. There are several UX One role-based landing pages delivered for financials, including:
- Accounts Payable Manager
- Accounts Receivable Manager
- Asset Manager
- Collection Manager
- Credit Manager
- General Accounting Manager
- Lease Administrator
- Lessee Accounting Manager
You can personalize and configure landing pages according to your needs.
Consider this use case:
“I am an Accounts Receivables Manager, and each morning I start up JD Edwards and have to go to many applications and view many reports just to know what I should do each day. I waste a lot of time just figuring out what is important. I’d really like to have all the information I usually dig up right at my fingertips as soon as I start JD Edwards. This will save me hours of time every week!”
You can leverage the Accounts Receivable Manager UX One page to help with this use case.
If UX One doesn’t have exactly what you want in analytics, menus, or watchlists, you can use the page composer to make your own landing page. To see how, check out the video below.
UDOs in Financials: Form Personalization and Form Extension
The third use case that UDOs can help with is when users say, “This application has to be easier to work with!” JD Edwards applications support many use cases and industries. Although product managers try to meet the needs of the mass audience, we know applications may not fit exactly what you need. Whether there are too many controls and grid columns, too few fields, nonsensical column titles, or out-of-order information, form personalization and form extensions can help.
Consider this use case:
“I am an AP Manager and I’m responsible for reviewing and approving any Payee Control changes. Sometimes it takes a long time to get this done as I have to click each change, go to an application to review the change, then go back and approve it. If I had all the information about the change in the grid, it would save me a lot of time and frustration!”
Form personalization and form extensions can fix these problems.
Form Personalization enables you to:
- Remove unused fields
- Add fields
- Remove entire sections or tabs
- Move or re-arrange fields
- Rename fields
- Make field required
- Change tab sequence
- Remove row or form exits
- Resize the grid
Form Extension allows you to:
- Add fields to the form from the Business View
- Add fields to the grid from the Business View
- Change tab sequence
- Associate an Orchestration to an application event
- Add a button to execute an Orchestration
UDOs in Financials: Cafe One
The fourth use case that UDOs can help with is when users need more information. Users can leverage Cafe One to make their applications more powerful.
Consider this use case:
“I am a General Account Manager, and I’m responsible for reviewing all the batches that ended in error during our nightly run. It’s easy to identify the batches that ended in error. The problem is I have to wait for the IT department to get me the error reports; otherwise, I have no clue what is wrong. I wish there was a way I could view the errors online right from the batch application.”
Feel familiar? You can extend the batch application to improve your productivity. Cafe One empowers you to see the actual work center errors for each batch and view the documents without having to exit the app and come back. JD Edwards delivers the Work Center application and this Café One Layout with UX One for Financials.
For a demo of this Cafe One layout, check out the video below.
UDOs in Financials: Orchestrator
The fifth scenario that UDOs can help with is when users are asking, “Can’t the system do this for me auto-magically?” Luckily, users can add automation into JD Edwards with the power of Orchestrator.
Consider this use case:
“I am a General Accounting Manager and I’m responsible for reviewing and approving all the manual journal entries created by the financial staff. We have the Batch approval process turned on, which we need for our auditors. The problem is I have to approve all the batches—even the ones generated by other processes that really don’t need my review or approval. I wish there was a way the system could automatically approve those types of batches for me.”
This is a commonly requested enhancement to improve the financial close process. You can leverage the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Orchestrator to help.
With the Orchestrator, you can create and schedule an orchestration to automatically approve all machine-generated G/L Batches.
Here’s how the use case is solved:
- Create a query to identify batches to auto-approve
- Use an orchestration to automatically perform the steps a user would take to approve the batches found by the query
- Schedule the orchestration to run
- Batches approved – problem solved!
Setting up any orchestration only takes a few simple steps:
- Record the steps a user would do to approve the batches
- Update the resulting Form Service Request to utilize the query
- Create the orchestration to call the Form Service Request
- Schedule it
For more information about UDOs in Financials like pre-configured notifications, UX One, form personalization, form extension, Cafe One, and Orchestrator, check out the presentation and additional Quest resources attached below or visit www.learnjde.com.