There are many ways of finding operational efficiency opportunities with JD Edwards. You could engage a good consultant, and ask them to fix it. They are going to look at your processes, talk to a limited number of power users and attempt to determine what is being used and how it's being used. Honestly, there does not seem to be enough evidence in an approach like this.
I like love data. I find that decisions about process and productivity are best supported by empirical data, whether that is movement in data or the results themselves. I guess where I'm going here is that good decisions are supported by good data.
UDO Analysis
At a high level, JD Edwards and oracle have done some amazing things with User Defined Objects (UDOs). I really hope that you have heard of them. These are configuration (not code) objects that are designed specifically to make users jobs better and easier. I've talked about UDO's a lot, all of the different types and tried to reiterate their importance - but not it's time to action this.
If you are in the position that you just want more UDO's, you are the rarest animal, and I like that. In general though, our goals are happy users, efficient processes and effective use of technology. So my goal is to help you use JDE better, and I'm going to start with UDO's.
Let's start with a dashboard, like I have created below:
This quickly tells us our production use of UDOs, the status of those UDOs, the type and system code that is implementing each UDO. okay, this is a a great start. We can start to slice and dice this data to find which system codes are using UDOs effectively and then work down to the users that have the most UDOs to work out why / how they are being used. Finding our power users is a great way to copying their ideas and making those UDO's public. This makes a lot of sense for Formats, Queries, watchlists and more.
Simple changes like this can drive productivity and efficient system usage - but it's supported by data. We also continue to monitor this data on a regular basis to find additional opportunities for system improvements.
We can also use the timeline (as above) to select the last week or 2 and ensure that any change management and training that we put in place for our users is WORKING. We can determine the UDOs being created. We can then focus on areas that have not been successful in implementing new features.
Hosting a couple of simple videos (perhaps as e1pages - imagine that!), and you might see some of this usage improving.
Application Analysis
I use a similar method for application usage and making sure that customers are using their modules effectively.
It's no secret knowing exactly what applications being used is beneficial, but it gets much better when you know what applications are not being used...
Imagine if you could understand ALL of the apps that are being used in every system code immediately (both batch and interactive) and then looking at what is not being used. With this information, a good functional consultant could be adequately armed to make some pretty concrete recommendations on how to improve the module usage.
A dashboard like the above one can tell you immediately, by system code, how many users are using which apps, how many page views and how many hours of engagement has been clocked over the last month (but choose any range).
By just selection procurement above, we can scroll down to the applications that are not being used and determine if there is benefit in bringing them into the fleet. They might be new and better ways of doing things. We can also look at the highest used application and perhaps focus on them for the UDO immersion (as described above), oh and then measure whether the pageviews or engagement time have increased. This is really handy information to act upon immediately.
Giving dashboards like the above to your power users can encourage changes, effectively enable continuous improvements.
Again, we see that a single dashboard shows us all of the AP batch information, we can see jobs that are running and jobs that are not. With this we can make specific recommendations on process improvement.
Conclusion
Good instrumentation in JD Edwards is critical for continuous improvement. The ability to measure metrics like the above with a single dashboard is half of the work in creating efficiency. At Fusion5 we have turn key solutions for implementing this reporting (in hours) and providing empirical data in a short period of time. We specialise in providing clients some clarity of the maturity score on a module by module basis and can provide a clear path to becoming "best of breed". ERPInsights is a critical tool for providing you with these dashboards and detailed reporting.
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