JDE delivers SCM enhancements for manufacturing, distribution industries

JD Edwards & Company has announced the release of ERP 8.0 and updates to Advanced Planning, including significant enhancements to its "Supply Chain Management" and "Collaboration and Integration" offerings for companies in manufacturing and distribution industries. Relevant to both mid-market and larger enterprises, businesses will benefit from new applications and capabilities, including:

* Enhancements to Demand Consensus, the industry`s unique collaborative forecasting application that reconciles human input as well as historical data to improve estimates of demand.

* Tactical Network Optimisation (TNO), an efficiency-enhancing production optimisation product specifically designed for the mid-market.

* Improved Web capabilities in Production and Distribution Planning (PDP) to expand collaborative capabilities to large numbers of customers and suppliers.

* New functions in the Warehouse Management application designed to dramatically reduce material and labour costs.

* More pre-defined collaborative business processes for supply chain activities, designed to cut time and money spent on integrating disparate systems and applications.

Demand Consensus is a collaborative forecasting application that combines human projections with historical data. While statistical forecasting methods can create certain forecast improvements, JD Edwards` research indicates that the addition of collaborative human forecasts can improve the accuracy by another 20%.

Demand Consensus is a Web-based application that brings planners, sales, executives, operations, customers, and suppliers together in a collaborative conference room environment to get better forecasting results. This application shares information with other JD Edwards planning applications-such as Demand Planning-creating the strongest combination of forecasting applications and short-range planning available.

Significant enhancements to Demand Consensus include:

* A new reconciliation tool that tracks and measures each stakeholders` historical forecast accuracy, weighting more accurate forecasters` projections to generate more accurate forecasts for the enterprise.

* Message board capabilities to collaborate and track forecast changes.

* The flexibility to import and export data from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets directly into or from the Demand Consensus application.

Based on the best-in-class Strategic Network Optimisation (SNO) application, Tactical Network Optimisation (TNO) provides a simple interface to this powerful solution, giving mid-sized enterprises the power to plan and optimise the design of their production and distribution networks, reducing overall operating costs. Customers benefit from an intuitive, Wizard-like set-up and the application`s capacity for rapid implementation.

Using TNO, businesses can make critical supply chain decisions and dramatically increase efficiencies by:

* Visualising the full supply chain.

* Optimising supply chain profit.

* Viewing supply chain costs in detail.

* Examining manufacturing constraints by plant.

New collaborative capabilities in JD Edwards` Production and Distribution Planning (PDP) application now allow customers and suppliers to share detailed information over the Internet. Web access to company supply chain data lets many more partners directly participate in the supply chain planning process. Using PDP, trading partners can review, add or change production schedules as needed, based on their role in the supply chain.

"JD Edwards supply chain management solutions will provide Winstone Wallboards with a scalable and expandable technology foundation that is easy to employ," said Campbell Benton, supply chain process manager at Winstone Wallboards, New Zealand`s sole manufacturer of plasterboard for residential and commercial markets.

"The Advanced Planning PDP module is being implemented to take us to the next level of planning capabilities and will enable us to optimise our plant and labour utilisation, reduce our investment in raw and finished inventories and ultimately better service our customers."

JD Edwards Warehouse Management, part of ERP 8.0, provides information about where products are located as well as how they should be moved to reduce costs and maximise space and labour resources.

A new workflow engine in Warehouse Management now allows users to optimise and fully automate the product pick-up, packing and shipping process. Appropriate cartons and containers are selected, and optimal shipment configurations are designed. Information on the shipment can then be automatically sent to customers, improving customer satisfaction. Using Warehouse Management, companies can reduce labour and material costs in the warehouse and can greatly aid customers in the receiving process.

In addition to Warehouse Management, ERP 8.0 also offers new enterprise software enhancements that are valuable to manufacturing and distribution industries, including Time and Expense Management and Enterprise Asset Management.

JD Edwards delivers Collaboration and Integration capabilities with XPI (eXtended Process Integration), the company`s integration platform, and XBPs (eXtended Business Processes), a set of pre-defined business processes designed to expedite the connection with disparate systems and reduce costs.

XPI, the company`s integration platform, has been enabled to support the evolving Web Services interoperability standards. In addition, JD Edwards is announcing:

* A new packaged set of XBPs for supply chain integration, providing enhanced real-time order promising capabilities for manufacturers and distributors.

* An enhanced package of XBPs for the high-tech and electronics industries, based on RosettaNet standards.

"As the business environment increasingly requires collaboration and supply chain networks continue to expand, enterprises must look to flexible, supply chain technology solutions that will evolve with those business needs," said Les Wyatt, chief marketing officer for JD Edwards.

"JD Edwards continues to listen to customer needs and innovate flexible software that meets those requirements, ultimately helping to make customers stronger. The launch of ERP 8.0 and the updates to Advanced Planning exemplify our passion to continually deliver new capabilities to our manufacturing and distribution clients."