You keep track of your schedule with a calendar. Your spending, with a budget. And with your JD Edwards, you use reports.
Reports are vitally important to all phases and parts of your business. They can provide actionable insights, support decision-making, streamline operations, and improve efficiency. But if your reports are incomplete, static or incorrect, an avalanche of bad outcomes can follow. From missed opportunities to operational delays to lost revenue, bad reports are bad news.
At ERP Suites, our experienced JDE consultants have overcome various reporting hurdles for many clients. We can help clean up their data, organize their structure and processes, and produce effective reports for better business practices.
This article provides insight into 3 common reasons why your JDE reports are incomplete – and what you can do to fix them.
What is a JDE Report?
JD Edwards reports are records of standard insights generated by JDE using your input data. These reports are considered basic in nature – they provide high-level information, but they don’t always have the detailed insights customers want.
Open sales orders, open purchase orders, and current inventory levels are some of the most common JDE reports. Because of their basic nature, these reports can leave some JDE users feeling unsatisfied. Because if your data is bad, your reports will be bad, too.
Three common reasons for inaccurate and incomplete reports include:
- Data quality
- Outdated tools and insufficient training
- Limited reporting scope
Your Reports Are Only as Good as Your Data
One of the primary drivers of incomplete reports is poor data quality. Master data is the overall record of your data, and transactional data refers to the data from each individual transaction.
Now, if your master data is messy, and your transactional information outdated, you’re going to run into issues. You could find yourself with duplicate inventory records. Or you could find open sales orders that were never canceled.
A medical device manufacturer experienced a classic combination of all these problems. They had residual data from a past merger hanging out in their master data. Their transactional data was all over the place, too, with open sales orders from ten years ago left unfulfilled and not canceled. To rectify, a comprehensive data cleanse was in order. They had to go through field by field, column by column, to rectify.
Takeaway: Without addressing your underlying data quality, any improvements based on data gleaned from your reports would be futile. Manually cleaning data might be necessary. While time-consuming, it’s the only way to get your data ready for accurate reporting.
If Your Team Isn’t in Top Shape, Your Reports Won’t Be Either
Your team needs to be well-versed on good data etiquette. Take the concept of the “freeze fence”. Within a planning system like JD Edwards, freeze fence means not accepting any changes to an order after a certain point. Otherwise, you will keep disturbing the schedule that order is on and will never achieve your targets.
If a team isn’t trained on this concept, they might continue to plug timed-out information into fields. This can cause a domino effect of errors – not least of which is an inaccurate report that doesn’t reflect the true circumstances on the warehouse floor. Inventory discrepancies, incompatibility issues, and a clogged supply chain are just a few.
Takeaway: Incomplete and inaccurate reports are a direct result of poorly trained teams and outdated tools. You need to practice holistic change management to ensure your teams are well-versed on operational and procedural standards, as well as proficient in the latest toolsets.
You Need to See and Analyze Your Data for It to Be Useful
Users are increasingly interested in having drill-down, deep-dive data analytics to make business decisions. If you’re not finding that with basic JDE reports, it won’t matter how clean your data is. You must be able to utilize that data, understand it, and draw conclusions in order for your reports to be worthwhile.
So, what’s a user to do to get comprehensive data for comprehensive reports? For JD Edwards, there are two choices:
- Use UX One
- Use a third-party tool
UX One is JDE’s own detailed reporting tool
This UX tool exists within JD Edwards itself. To use it, you need to be on the JDE Applications Release 9.2. and Tools Release 9.2.1.2 or higher. UX One enhances reporting capabilities through the intuitive, role-based user interface, using the “Alert, Analyze, Act” design principle. What this boils down to is:
- Users receive timely alerts,
- Users can see critical data, and
- Users can take immediate action.
All of this happens within a unified platform. Users can tailor their environment, making their data work for them. But while many features are accessible without additional licenses, creating new One View Watchlists or reports may require a full-use license for One View Reporting Foundation.
Third-party tools can also help provide detailed reports
The licensing costs for UX One can lead users to examine third-party solutions for detailed reports. Some of the most common options of these third-party tools include Microsoft’s Power BI; ReportsNow, a JDE-specific reporting solution; and insightsoftware, a connected solutions provider. Users then push their JDE data into the reporting tool, in real time.
Takeaway: If your data is obscured by limited reporting scope, your reports will be useless. Using tools to unlock your data in totality leads to better reports and better actionable insights.
A Winning Combination for Good Reports
Having good data, a trained team and the right tools will lead to accurate and complete reports. If you’re using outdated toolsets, and outdated data-gathering technologies and methodologies, your reports will suffer. Oftentimes, access to the right tools comes through something as regular as an upgrade.
Learn more about other ways an upgrade can help your business meet its goals.
