For those who might need a refresher, technical debt is a measure of a company’s burden that stems from aging and inflexible computer systems, and it can be just as much of a liability as financial debt. When exploring the topic, there are three main questions to ask;

• What’s the annual cost?
• Is the technical debt growing or shrinking?
• What will it take to substantially reduce it?

The Technical Debt Equation

Konrad Rogers, the Chief Information and Operating Officer at Nextworld, explains that most technical debt can be traced to a single source in an organization; the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. But how does this all happen? How does it build?

At first, when exploring an ERP for your company, it seems smarter to pick the fastest solution, not the one that preserves long-term resilience. There are investments in shadow IT initiatives, and you deploy technology that goes outside of the central technology organization. The complexity of the technological infrastructure increases, the data is fragmented, future upgrades become more expensive. Maintenance is a heavy-hitter and devours IT resources, making it difficult to develop new products and capabilities. The system becomes inflexible and unreliable.

The above situation can go on for years. Think about your own system, how long it has been in place, how many hands have dealt with it over the years. There were times of innovation in the past but with the way technology is in today’s world, the traditional way no longer benefits the same way that it used to. You need to pay off the principal of your technical debt so you can devote your resources to modernization. Per Rogers, the most powerful way to reduce technical debt and acknowledge the burden of your aging technology is to eliminate the legacy ERP system.

Switching to a modern cloud-based ERP can radically reduce the complexity of your organization’s technology infrastructure. Cloud solutions are designed for integration that increase speed, data accuracy, and flexibility.

“The best cloud software today is designed with a humility that accepts that no single solution can do everything. Rather, it’s built to work with multiple programs while keeping a single up-to-date version of critical data. Equally important, it empowers rather than inhibits innovation by business units.”

Making the move to Cloud is dependent on a variety of factors and it might not be the best fit right now however, there will come a time when you no longer have a choice. Perhaps your best strategy is to keep going on-prem with continuous innovation updates. Cloud is just infrastructure, so you don't need to move your whole instance. Maybe it's a good time to pick and choose what you want in the Cloud, like security, to test it out. Moving away from traditional ERP makes the most sense.

In the end, the opportunity to tackle technical debt must fit your overall strategy. If you’re not too sure what that strategy could look like, we would be happy to share more about our own story or what others are doing.

If you’d like to read Konrad Rogers’ full blog, you can do so here.

Supplier Discount Automation

This process increases savings and optimizes spend. It’s beneficial for those who are making at least a million dollars in vendor payments each year, with half of those payments eligible for a discount. Release 22 helps facilitate and translate significant savings. It maintains the Supplier Catalog by reacting to market conditions as they change with mass updates of base prices and effective dates. The Item Number filter simplifies the supplier catalog search. When creating Purchase Orders, you can automate the capture of basket, order, and volume discounts for efficient and accurate price calculations. The role-based pages provide a dashboard to focus on order activity and PO Approval Mobile Applications are handy for approving or rejecting purchase orders. You can also review order history and associated discounts to optimize future purchasing decisions.

More Efficient Requirements Planning

This helps with streamlining your CRP, MPS, DRP, or MRP processes. The Visual Bill of Material and Where-Used diagram allow for better data accuracy while the Copy Bill of Material by Branch makes it easier to add new manufacturing facilities. Capacity and Production Planning is automated and simplified. You can freeze work orders to eliminate unwanted action recommendations. Planning Summary provides planners and buyers visibility to urgent action messages and the Planning Console provides an interactive, supply/demand interface reducing time to action.

Automating Processes with Orchestrator

Orchestrator is all about rethinking how you do business. It optimizes human work, automates tedious tasks, and builds value. It all starts with creating a process, which you can record and capture the steps of the process by simply using the application. Orchestrator is for both technical and nontechnical users and when deploying the process, it allows the creation, sharing, automation, and securing of user defined objects. When you launch a process, the Scheduler provides an easy user interface that defines and activates scheduled automations. The simplest way to alert and act are via One View Watchlists and you can automate messages and workflows. There is still human interaction with orchestrations as you monitor processes and debug exceptions as well as build error-handling and notifications into the process.

Extending the User Experience Without Customizations

To optimize productivity, JD Edwards is trying to limit the need for customizations. Reducing customizations empowers you to adapt JD Edwards to your needs while at the same time not being bothered with the overhead created by doing customizations. With Release 22, you can implement what you need without having to write code or worry about how a customization carries forward with application and tools updates. E1 Page provides access to the most used tasks and E1 Search removes the need to access multiple applications. When looking at EnterpriseOne from a UI perspective, Form Personalization enables the remove fields for a streamlined application. Utilizing Form Extensibility facilitates the capture of additional information while Query retrieves data for a specific user or process. In order to meet market and industry needs, Logic Extension can help provide new business rules with specific requirements.

Transform to Continuous Adoption

With all the cumulative values and feature functionality enhancements, it can come across as a large effort for customers to get from where they currently are to be able to take advantage of the innovation and get value out of JD Edwards. However, this is where continuous adoption comes in. Customers that have 24/7 businesses can't afford for their users to be kicked off the system every time you have to deploy a package for EnterpriseOne. Continuous adoption eliminates that need. Coupled with continuous innovation and the reduction of customizations, customers can get to Release 22 quite easily. A Simplified Upgrade to 9.2 reduces the time and effort of a past upgrade and One Click provides a code current target. Update Manager streamlines patch evaluation, impact, insight, and automation. Object Usage Tracking monitors utilization. Compare Tools accelerates retrofitting while Assertion Framework reduces testing efforts. Most importantly, Zero Downtime deploys innovation without impacting availability.

If you’re interested to discover more ways that you can take advantage of the latest Release 22 updates, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We like to make certain that all JD Edwards customers are getting the most out of their ERP investment and so throughout this year, our own remote workforce has been hard at work guaranteeing just that.

The iSP3 Orchestrator Library
Our team has been working with our customers to develop an Orchestrator Library. Coupled with our development services to customize them for you, we’ve been able to ensure they are executed correctly resulting in planned and strategic Orchestrations.

Does your company do Meter Readings? Now we have a series of Orchestrations in our library that will allow you to process your meter readings by validating CSV input, updating readings in JDE, and logging errors for your reporting.

We can also help you to automate your exchange rate updates to multiple currencies with an easily managed Orchestration! From a source currency to multiple others, updated daily.

Our Orchestrator Library is sure to get your business a step ahead in 2021.

Managed Services
In 2020, our managed services gave clients the time and space to focus on what really mattered.  One customer; Saint John Energy, has been utilizing our services for several years as their JD Edwards CNC Managed Support provider. Michael Purcell, Supervisor Information Systems, noted that “We have been very pleased with them in providing Server support and monitoring, as well as the trouble ticket support. Saint John Energy did go out for RFP after iSP3’s first contract was up as a due diligent exercise and after reviewing the proposals again selected iSP3 again for our support.”

As you think about stalled projects that might be starting up again in the new year or inclement projects that cannot wait any longer, our team would be happy to offer a hand with daily, periodic or as needed technical and functional duties.

Amalgamation & 20th Anniversary
As of August 2020, our team became one with TeamCain Solutions Inc fully amalgamating into iSP³.  We appreciate your support of the TeamCain brand during the transition.  There is great value in bringing together the experience from both companies and while we couldn't meet up this year to celebrate our accomplishments, we are all looking forward to celebrating iSP³’s 20^th Anniversary in 2021. Our remotely connected team works incredibly hard for our clients and we would not be who we are without you.

Stay Connected
If you would like to stay connected to us for JD Edwards news and updates, please make sure to follow our company page on LinkedIn (click to follow). This is where you will find links to information about JD Edwards product updates, webinars, blogs and are able to network with other customers.  We invite you to join our community.

We hope you, your team and your families have a safe and happy holiday season and we look forward to what the new year will bring.