Not all JD Edwards customers have upgraded to 9.2 and many continue to drive business value with their current release.

Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 helps customers further streamline business processes by introducing a personalized user experience, new industry-specific functionality, helpful productivity features, and more support for global operations and compliance mandates.

Here are some of the highlights from Release 9.1:

Application and Reporting Functionality

• One View Reporting – Enables end users to quickly gain business insight while delivering 178 pre-defined reports providing answers to some of the most commonly asked business questions across the enterprise.
• Voucher Matching – Improve productivity and efficiency by automatically matching supplier invoices with purchase order receipts through rules-driven automation.
• Requisition Self Service – Increase flexibility by allowing managers or end users to delegate the entry and receipt of requisitions to other employees.
• Mobile Enterprise Applications – More than 80 purpose-built, streamlined applications accelerate business execution on popular mobile devices. Applications available on Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and as Archives on the Update Center include:
  • Project Time Entry – Enables workers at the job site to enter their time worked for project and non-project time
  • Sales Order Counts – Enables users to review sales order count by status, hold code, promised ship date and item within a branch/plant and to drill down to the sales order information.
  • Quote Review and Release – Enables users to review quotes and convert them to sales orders.
  • Product Price and Availability – Enables users to review price and availability information for an item.
  • Condition Based Maintenance – Enables users to quickly enter/update alerts based on equipment condition
  • Expense Entry – Employees can enter, review, and submit expense reports. Employees can also add photos of receipts and add comments regarding the expense. Managers have the ability to review their employee’s expense reports.
  • Sales Order Entry – Field sales and industrial counter sales users can look up items in a product catalog or scan the barcode of items and add them to a shopping cart. After order creation, an acknowledgement can be sent to the customer.
  • Manage My Work Orders is enabled for disconnected and offline use. Maintenance technicians can load their currently assigned work orders to their tablet, access the information offline, update work orders based on their progress, and then upload the changes back into EnterpriseOnewhen they are connected to a network.
• Regulatory Compliance – Updates to support compliance in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, and Spain
• Revenue Recognition Account Rules Changes – EnterpriseOne updates address new joint standards for recognition of revenue issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). The new reporting requirements are extensive and require changes to financial systems and processes to collect the necessary data. These updates enhance existing processes and add new features to enable users to adopt a new five-step process for revenue recognition, affecting all EnterpriseOnesolutions that recognize revenue including Accounts Receivable, Sales Order Management, Advanced Contract Billing, and Contract and Service Billing.

Industry Business Processes

• A project manufacturing enhancement that provides visibility and demand tracking throughout the manufacturing process allowing users to review all related supply orders impacting an end customer order to help ensure the project stays on track.
• Electronic batch record and device history record auditing enhancement which provides life science customers with support for FDA validated manufacturing processes by providing an audit trail over incident capture and resolution.
• New industry-specific business processes and capabilities for organizations in the food and beverage, agribusiness, real estate and professional services industries that support compliance requirements and enhance business productivity.
• Support for Global Locator Number (GLN) which helps organizations in consumer goods and other industries facilitate legislative compliance to seamlessly manage regulations.
• Country of origin tracking at the individual lot and serial number level that enables streamlined reporting by supporting import and export documentation requirements.
• Health and Safety Incident Management helps organizations avoid costly incidents in the workplace by managing the business processes associated with recording, tracking, reporting and analyzing a health and safety incident. Reporting provides users with an analysis of incidents, identifying trends and producing essential safety statistics to facilitate critical decision making. Out of the box reports support Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) compliance and help streamline the development of regulatory reports for other international agencies.
• Real-Time Financial Reconciliation Applications – Previously, month-end financial processing running batch jobs to reconcile account information from numerous related tables in the General Accounting, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivable systems. These batch jobs typically run for hours and require significant additional time to manually review the PDF output. The new interactive Financial Reconciliation applications perform the same function in real time and allow users to work with exceptions interactively. Real-time financial reconciliation provides users with immediate feedback and enables them to address exceptions immediately instead of having to wait for reconciliation processing at the end of a month or a quarter. This feature significantly reduces the amount of time needed for period-end closing.
• Rental Managementis a complete order-to-cash business solution for companies that rent capital equipment. This new product provides strategic visibility into inventory and equipment availability, supports high levels of customer service while effectively managing revenue and expenses for each contract. Items available for rent are easy identified. The business processes associated with creating rental contracts are streamlined through automatic generation of associated services, such as sales orders, service contracts, and purchase orders. Rental Management provides the ability to increase profits through up-renting and cross-selling of goods and services while providing rental utilization visibility.
• For manufacturing management, the new Work Center Load Review Calendar provides daily, weekly, and monthly calendar views of scheduled work center resources with a real-time view into remaining available capacity. The application displays over and under-capacity conditions in an intuitive graphical format and provides drill-down options to make scheduling adjustments, update work orders, and support planning. This information enables production schedulers to make scheduling decisions and changes more quickly and easily.
• Additional, new industry-specific business processes and capabilities for organizations in the food and beverage, agribusiness, real estate and professional services industries support compliance requirements and enhance business productivity.

Technology and User Experience

• End-user experience enhancements include:
  • Simplified user interface navigation designed for the casual or infrequent user. Configurable by user or role, EnterpriseOne Pages provide simplified navigation, contain minimal applications, and exclude extra features such as menus and the carousel.
  • A modern application look called ‘Alta’ including standardizes EnterpriseOne UI colors, fonts, icons, tabs, and buttons to match other Oracle product offerings.
  • Improved menu navigation using “breadcrumbs,” which provides quick access to recently run applications by preserving recent breadcrumbs between user sessions.
  • Improved calendar and email integration enabling users to send email and create meeting invitations from any application with a link back to the application.
  • Predictive auto suggest search and query refinement capabilities which increase productivity by providing a modern, intuitive user experience.
  • Rich hover functionality that delivers a dynamic and streamlined experience by allowing users to hover over enabled data to view related information without navigating away from the current page.
  • Application personalization which enables employees, customers, and suppliers to interact with the applications based on their own preferences.
• Business Interfaces for Oracle Talent Cloud (Taleo) – supports interoperability between EnterpriseOne Human Resources and Oracle’s Taleo Cloud Service. The interfaces include HR Requisition data and HR Employee Master data.
• Business Interfaces for Oracle Sales Cloud – interfaces for customers integrating with the Oracle Sales Cloud enable companies to increase sales and optimize efficiency. The interfaces include front office opportunity management in Oracle Sales Cloud with EnterpriseOne quote to cash, account and customer synchronization, tracking converted opportunities through order management, and item export processes into the sales catalog.
• Business Services Integration (BSSV) for EnterpriseOne – A replacement standard, JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services), is now available and JAX-RPC has been retired.
• EnterpriseOne Mobile Framework, in conjunction with the Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF), addresses the challenge of simplifying mobile application development, enabling developers to securely create and deliver a more customer-specific mobile experience while cutting application development costs. Tools enable organizations to easily build and securely extend mobile applications and deploy them to both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms, leveraging Java, HTML5, and JavaScript to deliver a complete Model View Control (MVC) framework, device feature integration, and built-in security.
• Server Management and System Administration enhancements for:
  • Management of mobile applications through Server Manager to include the daily tracking of key metrics such as connected users, connected device type, mobile application and version, monitoring, and logging.
  • Reduce the time to build and deploy modifications and patches to servers by removing the requirement to build a client package prior to the build of a server package.
• Java APIs simplify integrating EnterpriseOne Application Interface Services (AIS). These APIs allow customers to create Java interfaces developed in industry standard development kit such as Oracle Application Development Framework.
• Security Updates – EnterpriseOne continues to monitor possible security threats and provide security software updates to address these threats and to adhere to Oracle’s Security and Compliance policies.
• Internet of Things (IoT) Orchestrator – this new product enables customers to collect, filter, analyze, and act on real-time data as it is being transmitted by IoT devices. EnterpriseOne customers benefit by eliminating costly manual processes, by reacting to—or avoiding—business disruptions in real-time, and by analyzing historical data for continuous process improvement. Using these building blocks, business analysts can design orchestrations that tie IoT devices directly to EnterpriseOne applications, thus eliminating costly, mundane, and error-prone manual input and enabling enterprise operations based on accurate, real-time data.

This information was originally published in Issue 3 2016 of Q&A Magazine.