How important to the JD Edwards community is business process automation?  Who’s transforming their development process with personalizations and extensions?  Is Orchestrator still a big focus for organizations?  Who’s working on staying code current?  To answer these questions and more, Quest recently surveyed JD Edwards professionals to find out which JDE projects their companies are focused on over the next 12-18 months. These insights will be used to build out Quest’s 2022-23 programming for the JD Edwards community.

Topping the list of priorities (see Chart 1) for 44% of respondents was implementing or expanding Orchestrations, followed by leveraging JDE technologies to drive business automation (40%), staying code current (34%), using low-code or no-code tools (32%) and upgrading to Release 22 or beyond (30%).

Chart 1

Not surprisingly, many of these hot topics were discussed and dissected at Quest’s recent JD Edwards Forum at BLUEPRINT 4D and are key focus areas at our upcoming INFOCUS event.  We thought it might be helpful to share a reference guide to recent conference sessions that pull together the latest and greatest Oracle updates, real-life customer case studies and expert panels featuring Oracle partners, innovative customers and the JD Edwards product and engineering teams.

Priority #1:  Orchestrator

Customer interest in JD Edwards Orchestrator remains strong as companies look to integrate with outside systems or Cloud apps, streamline business processes and improve user experience. In response, JD Edwards has invested heavily in the Orchestrator as a way to connect external applications and interfaces with JDE business data and logic.  For those interested in digging deeper into recent feature updates and innovations, here are a few great presentations to peruse.  Listen in as Oracle’s Aaron Johnson, AJ Schifano and Haiyang Wang walk through the latest Orchestrator enhancements and use cases, including several great demos.  Check out this recent panel discussion, where JDE partners and customers share their real-life experiences of orchestrating  mobile applications.  Here’s also a great overview of 5 quick-win, real-life Orchestrator use cases for JDE customers, including automating exchange rate updates, creating sales orders from a CSV, onboarding customers quickly, calculating cost of living increases and duplicating records across branches.

Priority #2:  Business Process Automation

Also on the table for many JDE customers is enhancing business process automation (BPA)

through JD Edwards functionality is also on the table for many JDE customers.  Take a look at some recent updates from the Oracle JD Edwards product strategy teams and other technology partners for automation insights and information.  Start out with the JD Edwards keynote, where Oracle SVP Gary Grieshaber and JD Edwards exec Paul Houtkooper revealed how Digital ERP is helping customers drive innovation through functionality that automates, optimizes and transforms business processes.  Next generation workflow capabilities in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne are empowering business analysts to design and deploy automated business processes without deep developer skills or complex customizations.  Learn more in this update from Oracle’s AJ Schifano and Haiyan Wang.   Find out the secrets of successful business process automation in this session from RST Solutions as they discuss customer case studies and share the Do’s and Don’ts (plus live demos) of Business Process Automation.

Priority #3:  Staying code-current

Establishing a code-current strategy keeps JD Edwards customers updated with the latest product innovations.   Continuous Adoption, therefore, remains a critical area of focus for almost 35% of organizations who participated in the Quest survey.   For these respondents and others, this session from Oracle’s Clayton Seeley and Dave Bilthuis provides new insights as they walk through the latest Update Manager improvements that help simplify the update process and eliminate manual efforts to stay code current.  Or listen in to this customer panel to find out how other customers are staying current on JD Edwards while driving business innovation for their organizations.

Priority #4:  Exploring low-code/no-code tools

Another 30% of survey respondents indicated that utilizing low-code or no-code tools (another hot topic at our recent BLUEPRINT 4D event) was a near term priority for their organizations. With logic extensions, now available in EnterpriseOne Release 22, customers can extend application logic in a no-code/low-code way that is fast and simple, which will ultimately render traditional customizations obsolete.  Business analysts, developers and system administrators alike can learn about the benefits of logic extensions as in this update from the Oracle JD Edwards product development team.  For those interested in understanding more, Oracle’s Haiyan Wang also shared several useful demos and case studies of customers who have used the rich set of low-code/no-code frameworks to eliminate customizations and perform business processes more efficiently.

Priority #5:  Release 22 upgrades

Upgrading to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Release 22 also remains a hot topic for about one third of respondents.  Release 22 brings innovative solutions that helps customers optimize their JD Edwards applications, enabling those apps to act as the core for digital initiatives while simplifying and automating their JD Edwards instances.  See what JD Edwards leaders Keith Sholes and Jeff Erickson had to say about Release 22 in this JD Edwards product update.  Or dive deeper into the future of Digital ERP and Intelligent ERP in this discussion about the future of ERP with Oracle’s AJ Schifano.  Data visualizations are also new and improved in Release 22 with graphical apps such as Joint Venture Hierarchy, Property Map for Real Estate, Employee Organization Chart, Visual Bill of Material and Work Center Load Review Calendar all benefiting from updates that make them easier to implement and simple to adopt.  Listen in as Dave Greiner and Mike Jepkes from Oracle walk through how these updates simplify and improve experience.