A post a day keeps the blog police away

I’m trying to get a bit more information out around continuous innovation and applying this to JD Edwards. 

Fusion5 are working hard on having a single console to allow people to report on their site, their modifications and enable to see how many actual objects need to be updated to get them code current.  This is the easiest way of getting up to date.

To get to a single “pane of glass view”, we’ve done a lot of development on the side of JD Edwards (and in JD Edwards).

• ERP analytics to measure engagement and ERP usage – know what you use and what needs updating / what needs to be tested
• data studio to understand graphically UBE usage and statistics to further augment the above to a 360 degree view of a clients modifications.
• Form compare, an AIS based utility that can compare all of the controls on any form (between environments and even releases) – this will catch DD changes, vocab overrides and more – great for seeing what has changed on a form.  You can also use this for testing security!
• modification complexity matrix, looking over your OMW actions and understanding how complex your modifications actually are.
• object code hashing.  We have developed custom algorithms to create a hash of all objects in JD Edwards, with this information we can unequivocally compare objects between releases, environments and pristine – not just rely on date and time stamps.  This is a massive piece of work and it’s going to allow us to understand client sites at a whole new level.  We can use this information to compare with what is being released in the update centre, allowing clients to know EXACTLY how modified they are.  Combine this with the ERP analytics information above and you’ll also know your testing and updating strategies.
• We are working on some really cool green / blue deployments on AWS, burning staging AMIs for JDE and deploying these with some fancy session draining.  This is going to allow us to provide uninterrupted access to JDE, while pushing out ESU’s and updates continuously.  This in itself is an amazing step forward for agile deployments, and sits on the shoulders of all of the advancements that you see above.
• We are using OATS for auto testing and have written some pretty neat additional software items that allow for better testing of JD Edwards forms from an interactive perspective.

Really we want to look towards all of the advancements that we may be able to do, to get JDE into a CI/CD pipeline, as below:

This is precisely what Fusion5 are trying to do at the moment, make sure that JDE can do as much as possible to fit into this new paradigm.  (new for JDE).

We are working on many of the pieces of this puzzle for our clients. 

I guess now you have seen the big picture, and organisational goal for us to slip JDE into a Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline – and all of the unique things we are doing in this space to make it as automated as possible.

Today’s video is foundational in terms of how you can start to understand your users and your ERP better by plugging in google analytics (ERP analytics).