I love blogging about new technology appropriate for the enterprise. I want to change the face of innovation to embrace change, agility and promote an innovation culture.
It is more important than ever, making sure that you youa re supporting your "work from home" employees. NZ is in a 4 week lock down and I think that Australia is soon to follow.
If you are an existing ERPInsights customer – you can use this now… If you are not (I can assist you there too).
We are doing a super special to try and help JDE users in these uncertain times. If you want to see your usage data, check module usage, usage by city please reach out. The installation takes minutes (switching out a tools release), and then you will be in an immediate place to provide better insights to management and users on how the JDE base is changing.
The first page of the report is a documentation page, just showing you how to interact with the various components on the dashboard.
You can look at our demo data here, slice and dice on system code or location.
Something that has given me grief for a long term is understanding the impact of a tools release, package deploy or any technical change on performance.
Another thing I've struggled with is keeping enough batch history to understand my performance trending.
Well - have I got a post for you.
We've been working hard on taking JD Edwards data offline into the cloud - and providing generic reporting over the top of this data. We are starting with WSJ, but are going to move out to security history and perhaps work centre messages. What we are going to be able to provide is a seamless window to that data quickly, easily and with more insights.
You'll see below how we use a secure agent to transfer JDE data to bigquery (encrypted at rest and in transit) and provide our clients with a complete reporting suite into their batch history.
So back to my first two pain points - I can keep all the history I want - because it's in the cloud. And secondly, I have reports like below that allow me to drill down to those "all important" historical cubes to see what the performance of ANY UBE has been over time and reconcile changes quickly.
This shows that I initially drilled down on system code to see all of the 31 UBEs, I then chose a single UBE and then a single version.
I wanted to look at the daily average since Nov1 - and there we have it. A graphical summary. You can see that performance is pretty consistent. The below graph represents the rows processed and time taken, which have a symbiotic relationship.
IF you want to run this as a 1 off with all your UBE history, we can arrange that very quickly. If you'd like us to carve off your data and keep JDE quick, we can assist you with that too!
Things are starting to get pretty real with the current COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to get down a couple of items that might help people run and manage their beloved JD Edwards environments.
I'm breaking this down in the following sections.
·Enabling and Securing JD
Edwards for remote access
·Monitoring JDE access for
remote workers
·Highlight and Identify changes
in usage patterns of JD Edwards
·Focus within on process
improvement and automation opportunities
Enabling and Securing JD Edwards for remote access
Allowing your JD Edwards the flexibility to work from home might start to become more important with the changing work environment due to COVID-19. When working from home it’s critical that JDE is easy to use and that it’s secure. There are a couple of things that you want to get right.
First things first, edit the front page to not be picked up by google or bing crawlers... If you don't, people like me will google E1Menu.maf – as see your login page. There is good content available on how to stop web crawlers and we can certainly assist you too!
This could be more secure. It’s generally best to put a strong authentication challenge out the front of JD Edwards to prevent WebLogic vulnerabilities being publicly available.
A couple of nice options (depending on your architecture) is to use a web proxy, you can employ Azure (without being hosted there) or AWS (while being hosted there) constructs to protect your internal websites.
These are cloud options for forcing a credential check (based upon your LDAP) before getting the JD Edwards login page. Basically it's a challenge before you even get access to the internal JD Edwards ports. I think that this is a good idea unless you are super confident in your security practices.
We like the Azure option, it's really easy to get going with your Azure tenancy (generally O365 will allow it) and you can do an MFA challenge if you want to.
Figure 1: What an implementation of the Azure app proxy could look like with JDE.
Note that JDE shortcuts are probably not going to work, as they are defined to use the "known" URL, and you'll be using some sort of "proxy" url. Again, you can fix this with a slightly more complicated implementation of the same.
Fusion5 would be more than happy to assist you getting this up and running from your “work from home” employees.
Monitoring JDE access for remote workers
Once you have users coming in from the internet, you might want to start making sure your workforce is being productive. Working from home can have technical and other challenges – it’s critical to ensure that you users are not being frustrated or impended by this change. Fusion5 recommend using ERP Insights to ensure that you know exactly what is being access and by whom.
Figure 2: Our simple to use dashboards show you what is being used and from where. You can drill down to individual users, programs or countries.
You can instantly see what programs are being used and from where. All of the dashboards are interactive, so you can check on any country and system code that you want.
Figure 3: Drilling down on Procurement only
Above I’m just looking at procurement access in the last month, but I can choose the date range.
We have reports that also focus on your users and ensure they are able to access the correct applications:
Figure 4: We can now see week on week individual productivity figures on users
You have the same level of monitoring for your users, selecting a particular user will show their accesses in the current period and also the change that has occurred to the previous period. This is great information to let you know whether your users are finding it easy and quick when getting back to JD Edwards.
See a 3-minute video here: showing you what you can do.
Highlight and Identify changes in usage patterns of JD Edwards
Fusion5 can trigger alerts based upon system usage. If you generally have P42101 – Sales Order Entry opened 1000 times a day, we can send you an alert when this has not occurred. This type of information is beneficial to ensure that the technology is doing what it is supposed to do.
Using any of the metrics that you’ve seen in the section above (even batch metrics), fusion5 can evaluate the JDE usage data and warn you if there has been a significant change in behaviour that you want to know about, things like:
Number of JD Edwards users below a threshold
Number of sales orders processed by R42565 (Invoice print) have fallen below a certain threshold
Hours of engagement for JD Edwards has dropped for the United States user base
All of the above can be monitored and alerts sent if there have been breaches of threshold.
Focus withing on process improvement and automation opportunities
Quite often a challenging environment does bring out the best innovation ideas. It’s important to continue to focus on business improvements if things are getting quiet. Fusion5 encourages our clients to look at their JD Edwards usage from a different perspective and start to make process improvement changes, for example:
Look at the most commonly used applications and use form extensions and form personalisation to drive better performance and better usability. You’ll be able to measure the improvements with our dashboards.
Examine the applications that users are spending most of their time on – per system code. Once again you are able to use the latest tools releases to make improvements to the user environments without accruing technical debt. You will do more with less.
Deep dive on each of the heavily used applications and see if
An orchestration could improve efficiencies
An integration would allow for faster data entry and more accurate data transfer
An excel Marco could punch data into JD Edwards immediately without errors
Run batch jobs automatically with orchestrations
There are so many options to make processes more simple and measure the improvements when using ERP Analytics.
Ask us how we can enable some of these efficiency gains in your organisation.
I've been really quiet lately, not on purpose - things have been busy at work. This is a quick post on making JD Edwards available on the internet - securely! First things first edit the front page to not be picked up by google crawlers... If you don't, people like me will google e1menu.maf and find results like this: xxxx - I don't want to list them out and more and more... you gotta follow this: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9605477?hl=en to stop google and a few others. But, this is not really really secure. I must admit I have a couple of tricks that would have me logging into most publicly available JD Edwards instances pretty quick (most). okay, so my advice to you is - do NOT do this. You need to do more. A couple of nice options (depending on your architecture) are:
These are a couple of cloud options for forcing a credential check (based upon your LDAP) before getting the JD Edwards login page. Basically it's a challenge before you even get access to the internal JD Edwards ports. I think that this is a good idea unless you are super confident in your security practices. I like the Azure one, it's really easy to get going with your Azure tenancy (generally O365 will allow it) and you can do an MFA challenge if you want to. This allows you to quickly and easily publish a URL to your staff for remote JD Edwards access - they'll do a couple of logins - but they'll be in! And you'll feel more secure for it. Note that shortcuts are not going to work, as they are defined to use the "known" URL, and you'll be using some sort of "proxy" url. Again, you can fix this with a more complicated implementation of the same. If you are on AWS, then there is no denying that the WAP-ADFS is teh way forward for you. This will integrate directly with your ELB's and you can have it up and running in no time (well, in no time if you have a DC or access to your directory in your AWS tenancy).
Also remember that fusion5 have a product that allows you SSO capabilities using Azure Directory services. The cool thing here is that you can define the security challenge based upon the device, network, user and more. This allows you to force MFA when logging into JDE over the internet. Therefore if you do your homework on stopping the crawlers and you have an MFA challenge - you are in a pretty good place if you patch weblogic and JDE. Stay safe during these challenging times with respect to COVID-19. Encourage flexibility in work conditions. If you need to manage and monitor JD Edwards usage - we can certainly help out there too. https://www.fusion5.com.au/solutions/enterprise-resource-planning/jd-edwards/erp-analytics/
