Quest had the chance to speak with Bruce Bender, ERP System Administrator at Dutch Valley Foods, about the company’s upgrade to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2.

Key Takeaways

About Dutch Valley Foods

Dutch Valley Foods is a trusted supplier of bulk foods for a variety of retail outlets in the United States. Located in the heart of small-town Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the company focuses on delivering quality products at a good value while building long-lasting, personal relationships with customers and providing them with convenient services and top-notch solutions to everyday business needs. Dutch Valley Foods has an internal fleet of 73 trucks that travel to 29 different states throughout the country. Besides delivering with their fleet, they also ship to all 50 states, using UPS or Common Carrier.

Dutch Valley Foods first implemented JD Edwards in 2013. The company was previously running JD Edwards 9.1.8 but recently upgraded to 9.2 in April 2019. The company has roughly 70 users in both Pennsylvania and Ohio who are using the system daily.

Visit Dutch Valley Foods’ Website

What applications do you use in JD Edwards?

We use General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, AP, Manufacturing, Transportation, Sales Order Management, and Inventory Management. We actually use DSI for our inventory and we use Commerce Insights to handle our credit card processing. We use ReportsNow to handle daily reporting and Microsoft BI for dashboards. We also use third parties to handle routing for trucks, but we bring that information into JD Edwards.

How are you using the new features in 9.2?

We are leveraging several 9.2 features including form extensions, personal forms, CafeOne, grid formats, supplemental database, and Orchestrator.

Form Extensions

We implemented form extensions to replace some of the customizations like adding fields to pages. We are also looking to upgrade to the latest Tools release 9.2.3.3 this year as well, so then we will be able to use form extensions to work with tables and further eliminate some modifications that we have. Our users also utilize the User Reserved Date field in the purchase order header to keep track of our trucks’ schedule, and form extension helped us do that.

Personal Forms

We use personal forms in a number of ways. We changed category codes for customers and in Item Master. Additionally, we updated fields on our ItemTempClass form that helps track certain temperature regulations throughout the shipping process.

CafeOne

CafeOne is utilized to display supplemental data on multiple screens, but it is also used to pull information from the U.S. Postal Service and Google Maps. We worked with UPS to enable users to validate an address without leaving the browser window. Essentially, CafeOne utilizes the UPS API to pass the address through UPS and back to the original webpage in order to verify its legitimacy. We also use CafeOne to bring in Google Maps features for truck drivers so that they could view appropriate drop-off locations for customers.

Grid Formats

Dutch Valley Foods utilizes grid formats to easily rename columns in a grid.

Supplemental Database

Supplemental data helps us keep track of the temperature of each item during the entire shipping process, and we use CafeOne to show the supplemental data on multiple screens.

Orchestrator

We are also in the midst of being trained on Orchestrator, so we look forward to utilizing that functionality more in the future. Dutch Valley Foods is working on using Orchestrator functionality to gift customers with a giveaway item. The item is free to customers when they purchase something else. Orchestrator places the item on hold with a unit price of $0 until the requirements are met.

We would like to use Orchestrator more in the future to continue to reduce the number of customizations in our system. Ideally, we would like to move toward having no customizations at all.