JD Edwards starts 2002 with major product releases

JD Edwards, the major international enterprise software vendor, started 2002 with a number of new product releases and upgrades.

Following its acquisition of CRM vendor, YOUcentric, last year, the company announced the new JD Edwards CRM module using the integration capabilities of its XPI middleware. Organisations will be able to use the XPI technology to connect JD Edwards CRM to their ERP and supply chain applications, regardless of vendor, and on any platform. For JD Edwards customers, the CRM version 1.1 creates a unified "lead to cash" business process to handle all customer interactions.

In the supply chain field, JD Edwards released Advanced Planning 4.0, which contains a number of new features and functionalities, including:

* new scenario simulation capabilities in the Strategic Network Optimisation application,

* "Profitable-to-Promise" and "Capable-to-Promise" Order Promising,

* a real-time Microsoft Excel client and new Web enhancements for Production & Distribution Planning, and

* a new application, Demand Consensus, which allows planners, executives, sales, operations, customers and suppliers to perform forward-looking collaborative forecasting.

Entering a new application area, JD Edwards released Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), software that assists asset-intensive industries to maximise performance, productivity and return on plant and equipment. While this is a new module, the software is based on a solution used for many years by JD Edwards` customers in the maintenance management field.

"Asset-intensive businesses that implement EAM solutions can facilitate the scheduling of equipment downtime and the planning of maintenance outages in advance," says John Van Decker, Program Director, Meta Group. "By doing this, EAM can increase the efficiency of their assets, while decreasing the potential of lost revenue (and increased expense) caused by unplanned equipment failures. A solution effectively integrated into ERP processes can add value with an attractive return on investment."

Asset-intensive industries such as oil and gas, telecommunications, utilities, construction, industrial manufacturers and mining among others, rely heavily on optimised utilisation of assets for competitive advantage.

* Fixed Asset Management,

* Plant and Equipment Maintenance,

* Service and Warranty Management,

* Failure Analysis,

* An Intelligent Graphics Solution.

A suite of Web-based applications for Supplier and Customer Self-Service was also announced, and a new version of the JD Edwards OneWorld Portal. The Supplier and Customer Self-Service applications allow OneWorld owners to share business information with trusted individuals and organisations. Partners along the supply chain can use Supplier Self-Service to access the information and applications they need within a business` OneWorld system. Customers can use Customer Self-Service to enter and modify forecasts, review orders, track shipments, manage user profiles, review account information, and obtain personalised alerts.

Customers and suppliers do not need to have OneWorld themselves to access the information stored within the host organisation`s system. Instead, they can access the self-service application as if they were pulling information from the Internet.

The OneWorld Portal has been upgraded and enhanced to allow users to view JD Edwards applications and external content from their desktop or remote location over the Web. Portal information can be viewed from multiple devices, ranging from desktop PCs to mobile platforms.

In the technology area, JD Edwards made three announcements. It announced that it had been certified for Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. This indicates that the JD Edwards and the Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server solution provides the highest levels of reliability, availability and scalability as required in enterprise-class, mission-critical applications and high-volume real-time transaction processing systems.

In conjunction with Sun Microsystems, JD Edwards publicised the highest concurrent user record for OneWorld Xe running on Sun Fire servers and Sun StorEdge arrays. The benchmark supported 8,969 concurrent HTML clients, and reaffirms that OneWorld can scale into high-volume enterprise environments.

IBM and JD Edwards recently completed a joint benchmark of OneWorld Xe with IBM`s DB2 database software running on Unix. DB2 is JD Edwards` preferred OneWorld Xe database for Unix environments. The benchmark demonstrates that OneWorld Xe and DB2 can meet the most demanding customer performance requirements. A recent study by analyst firm DH Brown has found that DB2 is half the price of Oracle 9i in all configurations with external Internet deployment and provides customers with a lower total cost of ownership by as much as 30%. The report also points out that DB2 provides a greater level of database administration advantages and efficiencies.