Quest had the opportunity to speak with Chris Park, Supervisor, Business Analysts, and Matt Wiles, Senior Business Analyst, from Christie Digital Systems Inc. about leveraging User Defined Objects to improve the user experience.

About Christie Digital

Christie Digital is a global visual, audio and collaboration solutions company that offers diverse solutions for business, entertainment and industry. Some examples of their installations include Star Wars: The Force Awakens World Premier and the CNN Democratic Presidential Debate in 2016. The company’s international headquarters is located in Cypress, California and the Engineering and Manufacturing headquarters is in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Christie Digital implemented JD Edwards World in 2000. They migrated to EnterpriseOne XE in 2005 and upgraded to 9.1 in 2013. They are currently running 9.1 Applications and 9.2.05 Tools on-premise on an iSeries. They hope to go live on 9.2 Applications later this year.

Visit Christie Digital’s Website

What drove you to start utilizing User Defined Objects?

We have a lot of information on our system that we want to push to users. Business users only want to see information that is relevant to their roles, and IT doesn’t have time to customize every request for them. We started looking for tools that could facilitate information sharing, and then when we upgraded to Tools 9.2, we were introduced to User Defined Objects.

What benefits have you noticed after implementing User Defined Objects?

We’ve implemented Café One, Watchlists and Composed Pages, and we’ve seen an overall increase in user engagement with JD Edwards. We’ve also noticed improved user productivity.

Since UDOs are easily created by business users, we’ve also had a reduced number of customizations by IT and administration overhead for Development. This means reduced costs across the board and easier JD Edwards upgrades.

We’ve also found that Composed Pages are a good training tool that help us reduce user training time for our new Korean implementation. The visual business process flows on the Composed Pages make it easier for new users to learn JD Edwards. They replace the manual paper process flows that were previously used for new implementations.

What do your users like about the new features you’ve implemented with UDOs?

Watchlists have been a big hit with our users. Data is pushed straight to them, and it helps them be proactive instead of reactive. It’s increased their productivity, and they have a lot of positive feedback! Here are a few examples of comments that we’ve gotten:

“The team is loving the visibility the watchlists provide! We are able to manage our orders more effectively using JDE and we are informed more quickly when something doesn’t go to plan! Thank you for giving us access to this great feature!”

– Danielle, Director, Global Customer Service and Demand Planning

 

“This is fantastic! Every query gives me visibility to all my orders, backordered in ship confirm, PDD, orders due in 5 days, etc. The watchlist allows me to focus on orders that are due in 5 days with credit hold or any other type of hold instead of finding out the day of release. By far, this has been a good idea.”

– Nayeli, Customer Care Coordinator