Last week, the Oracle JD Edwards community assembled in San Antonio for its annual users conference Collaborate. As you can imagine, it was a whirlwind week full of JDE and Oracle updates, best practices, case studies, networking events (Side Note: Thank you to everyone who stopped by the ManageForce party), and generally so much to do with too little time to do it all.

If you weren’t able to make it, or just weren’t able to make it to all of the sessions (it’s a packed week!), we’ve broken down the JDE highlights, so you won’t miss a thing.

Get on With the Digital Transformation Already

It’s time to move beyond strategy and actually get to the transformation, a point Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle’s Senior VP of Product Development, drove home during his JDE keynote. Following the Tools 9.2.3.3 release on April 6, JDE was unsurprisingly eager to share all the reasons why businesses should stop postponing their upgrade. Or as Ekdahl put it, “The closer you are to 9.2, the closer you are to realizing your digital strategy.”

It’s Time for 9.2 (Now!)

Here’s a shocking statistic for you, just about half of JDE users have not upgraded to 9.2 yet. So, statistically speaking, there’s a good chance that includes you. At Collaborate, there was no shaming, just showcasing how 9.2 has already helped some JDE users achieve their digital transformation goals. The message was clear, it’s time to upgrade and continue innovating, not with “big bangs” as Ekdahl put it, but through constant innovations/iterations. Those iterations include all of the JDE solutions, of course, but the key components of 9.2 highlighted throughout Collaborate were:

JDE Orchestrator - As Ekdahl explained in his keynote, JDE Orchestrator is, “a profound and significant enhancement to the application suite.” Orchestrator provides the foundation for automation and integrations with other JDE apps and third-party applications. Automation was a pervasive theme throughout the week, and as Ekdahl said plainly in his keynote, JDE is working to help its users decrease friction by compressing processes and a big part of that is automation. Whether it’s reporting, auditing, or another vital function of your business’ IT, 9.2 can likely help you automate it, saving you time and money.

UX One - If you’re still using 9.1, you have access to UX One, but you’re missing out on its full potential for personalization. For example — role-based pages with One View Watchlist and analytic content is only available with the 9.2 update. This kind of personalization lessens IT backlog, reduces steps in business processes, and by helping you avoid the need for additional customizations, simplifies upgrades.

Mobile - Mobile isn’t just a nice-to-have strategy for companies anymore, it’s expected. So, with Orchestrator still at its center, the JDE mobile universe is finding ways to simplify mobile for its users. That includes flexibility around what development tools can be used (including low-code and no-code options) and making sure that things can be developed quickly. That includes templates to get you started, but generally JDE is looking to move away from “out-of-the-box” mobile solutions in favor of more personalized opportunities.

For some great customer use cases and even more JDE insights, see the full keynote here. And if you’ve been postponing your own transformation by putting of your JDE upgrade, give us a call. We’d love to help you find the right upgrade and management strategy for your JD Edwards solutions.