JD Edwards Barcode Scanning: Real Costs, Hidden Fees & ROI Breakdown

Table of Contents   

1. Introduction

2. Pricing Tiers and Features

3. Subscription Model vs. Traditional Licensing
4. Implementation Costs and Customization
   
5. Implementation Process and Transparency
6. Custom Flows, Complexity, and Hidden Costs 
7. Scalability, Growth, and ROI
8. Operational Savings and Comparisons
9. Closing

Transcript

Introduction

And with a subscription base too, maybe one day you wake up and you're like, "Actually, we're going to go in a different direction. We're going to change our hand a little bit. We're not going to need scanability." You can cancel it, right? It's not it's not something that you're you have to be a part of for the rest of your life. It's not like that at all. There's a tremendous amount of flexibility that you can truly see with this. Thinking about adding barcode scan into your JD Edwards environment. Not sure if you'll end up with a predictable subscription or a pile of hidden costs. Today, we're diving deep into the real cost of JD Edwards barcode scanning. From pricing tiers to implementation fees, but I'm joined by Steve Clampet from ERP Suites to break it all down. If you're evaluating barcode solutions, this episode will give you the clarity and numbers you need to make a smart move.

Welcome to Not Your Grandpa's JD Edwards, where we explore modern ERP tools and strategies without the fluff. I'm Nate Bushel, and today we're tackling a big one, the cost of mobile barcode scanning in JD Edwards. Joining me is Steve Plant, director of solutions architecture at ERP Suites. He's been deep in the trenches of mobile enablement and knows exactly what it takes to roll out a solution like scanability. Steve, welcome back to the pod. And for the listeners out there that haven't seen you on the podcast before, can you give us a little bit of your background?

Sure, absolutely. Thanks, Nate. Um, glad to be back. I had a good uh first first round, so ready to do it again. Uh, my name is Steve Clamp and I have been in the JD Edwards space, specifically um, you know, mostly involved in data collection, mobile global data software solutions for the better part of 25 years. So, I've been with uh ERP Suites now for a couple and just uh enjoy being here and enjoy uh getting to know the people and uh helping out with everybody.

Yeah, we have a great team, a bunch of stars and a lot of them have been on the podcast which has been great. A lot of knowledge here, which is fantastic in every single segment that we do have. It's really overwhelming how much knowledge some of these people have. Um but let's start from the top. What are the basic pricing tiers for scannability and what do those include?

Pricing Tiers and Features

So high level we have three tiers uh essentially. So our first tier is core which it gives you about up to 25 users. You get unlimited uh 247 P1 support uh native analytics and then obviously your your Android iOS you know Windows OS.

Um, middle tier would be advanced and that's going to give you about 75 users, uh, unlimited 247 support and then 60 hours of what we call advanced support. That basically kind of covers like flow development, um, in each flow additions and then application support and then process optimization.

And then our top tier which is unlimited that's going to give you unlimited users as well as 247 support uh with the 120 advanced hours and then also which typical with a SAS product your top level you're going to get development platform so as well on that on that on that top tier.

Exactly. And with that advanced or unlimited I guess I would say you actually get a discount for the additional advanced support with the hourly rate which is why a lot of people do end up using it. And then again there is there are different situations for every company. You know you have the smaller companies that maybe only need 25 users. You don't need a lot of additional support. It's not something that's really in the cards for them. So there's a lot of differences. It's all what a company truly wants and what they need. It's not just buy our most expensive version because that's the one that everyone gets. No, like it is all based on your company. Yes.

Subscription Model vs. Traditional Licensing

But yeah, let's let's dive a little deeper. How's this subscription model compared to the traditional like what else you see out there with the buy once upgrade later and how does that approach um how's that approach differ like to e users?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, and this is going to be true of, you know, any SAS solution, right? You know, we're talking, you know, lower upfront costs, right? So, right out of the gate, you're not spending as much money and you're going to have predictable, you know, predictable monthly numbers, right? You're going to not have to worry about that. You're going to get with, and this is one I think is really key, is you're going to get updates, right? You're going to get automatic updates. You're going to get maintenance. You're going to get scalability, right? If you need to scale up or or scale down, you're going to have that. Um, obviously. And then you're uh clearly going to have built-in backup data recovery for sure. Uh and you might also be able to with that with that footprint, you know, with not being on prim, right? You might be able to, you know, mitigate IT resources, right? The people the number of people that need to manage that software might be a lot less, right? So you got that as well. And clearly with what what I think is what's what's great for us is that you're going to be able to take advantage of the latest and greatest tools within JD Edwards, right? So 9.2 and then whatever release that we're on, you're going to be able to flow with that as you're as you're on the product. You as your JD Edwards instance grows, so can your scatability instance, right? Along alongside each other.

Yeah. So what you're saying is uh if you buy it once like when there is an upgrade you might have to upgrade that software or something in that and with a subscription it kind of upgrades with it. It's kind of included. Is that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What that that's one of the harder parts is with with onrem is that yeah you absolutely you're you take all that management and it's on you right obviously. So you you have to manage that software you have to manage upgrades. You're going to work with your vendor, of course, but it's still that's still a a task, right? That whether that's upgrading hardware, whether that's upgrading to the latest release of the software, you know, that's still a project, right? That's still something you're going to have to manage. So, for sure that that the risk of that or I I maybe not necessarily risk, but that work kind of is on us versus you.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, obviously for companies that maybe there is an upgrade around the corner that you guys are really thinking about, you're going to have to wait for your buy once scanability. But if you need the scanability now, there's more flexibility that comes with actual scanability versus other mobile barcode scanning solutions. Right.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. But I know you touched on this a little bit about the more scanability side and what ERP Suite does, but what's a typical cost associated with each of these?

Implementation Costs and Customization

Sure. So, um, and this kind of depends on what you want to implement, right? So, we have most customers are going to be looking at a certain suite of flows that they want to run, right? Um, and what's always going to be the X factor is, you know, customizations, right? So, as we as we as we look into that and as you're a customer shopping and that's one of the questions that you got to ask yourself first is, you know, how how closely to base do you want to run these flows, right? And I think anytime that you can do your best to stay base and stay within the flow of JD Edwards, um, that's going to keep your cost lower, right? It's not a foolproof, but, you know, anytime that you if you're running like a a simple flow, right? you know, inventory or things like that, you know, you're talking, you know, 5 grand, 10 grand. But if you're talking something where your customizations where it's advanced transportation warehouse or anything that's heavy and and thick, you know, you you could you could get yourself into six figures. So, I just kind of you have to you have to know that that's as I say, any kind of level of complexion that complexity you add, you know, that that's likely to add complexity to the bottom line, right? Just it's just truth.

So exactly and it's all based on customers again like it depends on what you truly need and the complexity and everything that you can think of in terms of a flow in terms of maybe you have a very specific business that maybe we haven't seen before or maybe well every vendor hasn't seen before. So there might be that additional cost that goes into it. But for teams that are trying to budget, what's the advantage of knowing your annual cost upfront when it comes to subscriptions,

Right? Well, yeah, for right there, the the flexibility of knowing, right, that you you you can plan that out and especially when when you're talking about annually, right, when you go back to do budgets, right? You're going to know, you know, you're going to know what that those annual costs are. Also, I think another thing that might be interesting is that you can compare apples to apples, right? when you're doing fix and you know what you're looking at, you can kind of compare, right? When it when it's a software as a service, but when you're talking perpetual traditional model, it's harder to it's harder to compare, right? Because you're going to you don't know what you're what you might customize, what you might look for. It's it's kind of like what what are you going to take off a shelf and pay for, right? And that's harder to manage. That's harder to know what you're going to be getting yourself into.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's there's a lot to unpack when it comes to any type of addition when it comes to mobile barcode scanning in general and there's just a little bit more flexibility like exactly what you said. Um, it gives you free range to your barcode scanning solution isn't holding you back from a certain upgrade or a new tools release or anything that could mess with your flows that are already there. scanability you won't really see that is what I'm

yes

understanding here right

yeah the the integration between scanability and just your JD res instance is pretty seamless and so you don't have you do not have to worry about this you know potential other set of hardware potential other set of whether like we said earlier you like if you have to do an upgrade that's a whole project right so as it with it being baked into scanability um yeah absolutely very true

Implementation Process and Transparency

Yeah, okay that makes sense but What goes into implementing scannability beyond the subscription side? What's that look like?

Yep. So typically you're going to have a obviously a requirements gathering process. You're going to walk through possibility as is to be scenarios and and go through that process evaluation. You're also going to want to do you know you'll do your warehouse shop floor walkthrough to kind of gather gather data as best we can to understand what you want to do. And then you're going to want to sit down with us and walk through what flows you want to use. you know, what of the suite that we own and that we offer. Um, what are you going to be have, you know, are we going to be doing inventory, manufacturing, uh, you know, warehousing, uh, all that, all that. So, kind of honing down, okay, what do you have now? And also, that's going to be a conversation with what do you have now, you know, and compared to what what we need to do, what what we're trying to solve. And that's something that we're that we can definitely handle and and and we'll work with you on is you what do we have today? What workflows or scripts do you have today? And then how can we translate that into a scanability solution?

Yeah, exactly. And there's it's kind of like any other project out there, you know, like there's a lot of similarities when it comes to this except there isn't a lot of upfront cost.

Yes.

Right away. And there aren't these, oh, you have this quote and it says this amount and it might take longer, so it's now this amount and then oh no, something's not what we think. So it's now this amount. It's an upfront cost. It's right there in your contract. You have it there. It's not going to exceed it, which it feels like there's more visibility here versus other companies that are out there. Am I right with that?

Yes. And I think it also takes the stress out when you know that you you are basically running these pre-built flows as we call them and you don't have to worry about uh to to that level of detail, right? like where where you would get yourself into a customization, right? I think we really help with that process and we make it pretty simple. You know, here are the workflows that we offer and here's the solutions that we can deliver to you without I say I would say a lot of the fuss that you would have in the back and forth of of the design phase. We we we simplify that a lot.

Yeah. Which is I mean I feel like the user experience here seems to be a little bit better, but I'm not going to make that disc or that decision yet.

Sure.

Custom Flows, Complexity, and Hidden Costs

Can you give us I know you touched on this earlier, but can you give us a ballpark range of what these custom flows usually cost to build out?

Yeah. So, so when we're talking uh kind of a straightforward base workflow where you're just doing, you know, a simple like inventory transfer transaction or something like that that's not usually customized, you're you're talking, you know, smaller dollars, you know, five grand, 10 grand, something like that. But as you as you walk yourself down into more complex territories and you might talk about warehousing, license plating, you know, transportation, manufacturing, where you can introduce a level of complexity, you know, that that's where things can kind of run away, right? And you have to really be paying attention to what how you want to solve the problem. And that's where we come into play. And we we walk through that process and we, you know, here's what the process is today and here's what you want to want it to look like in the future state. And you know, I've I've just as an industry professional, I've been in this for a long time. That that's that's where the rubber meets the road, right? And that's where you find out you can be spending a lot of money depending on how many customizations that you might want to do. And a customization adds X level of cost always. Um, and that customization could mean um, you know, workflow development, but also could mean JD Edwards development. And so now now your levels of complexity have gone up which likely will mean your cost will go up as well.

Yeah. And I see again it goes back to what you really need to do but there is a certain amount of flexibility and you're right like a lot of these flows that you might consider to be complex. We might have seen them before. They might not actually be that complex.

Abs. Absolutely. It's all about having that conversation. And again, we go back to the transparency, which it seems like there's a lot more transparency from one side of it versus the other because yeah, when you come to an upfront cost, they tell you this amount and then all of a sudden it could become this amount with you're like, what what happened in between that?

Yes. I I think the with the the beauty of it is that when you want to run a transaction, what what our goal is to what does that transaction look like in JD Edwards? And we're going to make that happen. And I think that's the that's the kind of the hidden beauty of it is what we want to do is to navigate you through the JD Edwards system as best we can through our scannability product.

Yeah. And I mean we already talking about hidden. Are there any hidden or commonly overlooked costs that companies should factor into their budget?

Absolutely. I mean for sure we're talking about um u maintenance costs obviously and and the idea that um you're responsible for uptime you're you're responsible for that system you know if that's an on-prem software solution if any downtime that happens that that's on you and so you have to manage that that's that's resources that you have to allocate this is true of um also of upgrades you know that that's when you do the implementation, right? You're excited and everything's great, but a year or two down the road, you're going to have to recognize that there has been updates in that software and you're going to want to utilize them. And that's that's something that often gets overlooked in the in the initial, right, ramp up of the of the original project. It's easy to kind of overlook that, hey, we might need to upgrade. And that with that upgrade comes scalability, too, right? So, five years from now, you might need to do an upgrade, but you also might have transactional volume that requires you to upgrade. So, um I think that that's that that can be hard to to manage and I understand that. But, um those are some of the things that you you need to really pay attention to as you're as you're as you're getting into it and making those decisions of what are we trying to solve? As you've said, you know, what are we trying to solve and and how do we go about that? And it doesn't have to be um it doesn't have to be as difficult a as it as it can be out there. So,

Scalability, Growth, and ROI

100%. And yeah, look, everyone thinks that they know their business really well. And I'm not saying that you don't.

Sure.

But what if let's do a what if scenario. You're five years out. You're planning five years. All right. Five years from now, I want to have an upgrade.

Yeah. An upfront cost. You can pay it once and for those five years, you're gold.

But what if in that five years, your business takes off?

the amount of cost that is going to go into you trying to upgrade and all like maybe moving that upgrade up or maybe you have to add more users, maybe X, Y, and Z, more custom flows. There are so many things that go into it.

They're on you or you have to go back to that business that you did that deal with and say, "Please help me. We blew up."

Absolutely. Yeah. And that's and that's a I think as I'm thinking that that's a resource drain, too, if you think about it, right? So if you if you go down that path, no matter what you choose to do, you're going to have to ask more of your resources available. And that and that, you know, obviously that takes your eye off the ball of your business, right, of your business running. And if you're having to take your eye off the ball just to manage your softer, just to to mitigate issues within that that life cycle of that piece of software, you know, that that's that that takes effort and that that and that eventually costs money as as we both know. So absolutely.

Exactly. And don't you want a business that it's propelling you forward and is making making it easy for you to grow and not something that like, oh, we better not grow too much this year because if we grow too much, then we have to pay X, Y, and Z. And when you're wanting to grow, when you're wanting to be successful, you're not thinking, oh, what if I become too successful? No, that's not something you ever want to think about, right?

You never want to think about that.

And it and it happens. I mean, I've I've I've experienced that where you you do have a meteoric rise in in success depending on the industry and the product, right? That can absolutely happen. And the converse and you you might need to slow down. You you don't want to be paying for what you don't need. You know, I think the converse is true, too. And and and being able to do that with with relative ease, I think, is pretty powerful. And that's not something you're able to do with relative ease when it's an on-prem solution and you're having having to manage it yourself from front to back, right? From from software, hardware, data recovery, all that stuff, right? That that all that onus is on you.

Exactly. And why would you want to spend funds on something like that when you can spend it on expanding your business and making it more and more accessible for all the customers that are out there?

Well, I mean, we're talking about it anyway. So what kind of ROI are customers typically seeing within like the maybe even just the first year of using Scanability?

Sure. That that first year, you're obviously your financial predictability, right? You're going to know your monthly cost. You're going to know your annual cost that first year depending on, you know, the kind of contract that you sign uh for sure. And you know, any pro any thing you're going to notice too is that you don't have to worry about upgrades. You don't have to worry about maintenance. Two things that are that that cost as you go along. So that first year is going to be covered. Um, and I I think that that's that's really beneficial to a customer that's looking to that, like we said earlier, like you may not need more than 25 users. You may not need more than 50 users. And I think you think about that, it's something they can really tailor to themselves and tailor to their solution and not have to worry about all these additional things that you would have to worry about when you're you're buying a kind of a traditional product off the shelf.

Yeah, exactly. And obviously we've harped on that throughout this entire episode of the flexibility, the planning side of it. You don't have to worry as much of what your success or what a change or what an upgrade or any one of these things could truly do to something that you already paid for.

Yep. And with a subscription base too, maybe one day you wake up and you're like, actually, we're going to go in a different direction. We're going to change our hand a little bit. We're not going to need scannability. you can cancel it, right? It's not it's not something that you're you have to be a part of for the rest of your life. It's not like that at all. There's a tremendous amount of flexibility that you can truly see with this. And yes, maybe eventually like if you're using scannability for, I don't know, 20 years, something like that, maybe even less, you might see that it could get more expensive than that one-time cost. But throughout those 20 years, if you're not upgrading your JD effort system, your business is probably not working right.

Right.

And and I've I've experienced that and I've seen that, you know, and and that is a that is a challenge to not only manage your JD Edwards instance, but also manage your your barcode, you your data collection system, right? Those are those are two separate pieces of software. It traditionally those are two separate pieces of software that adds a level of complexity to your system, right? And as you're only as good as your as your assist as your JD Edwards system is, right? So as you upgrade that and and as a partner you we help you with that and then it's just this nice bolt-on to put scannability right beside it and they can grow together and and obviously we have skin in the game. We we we know we know how this works and we're we're certainly here to help those customers that are ready to like know that we're we're going to manage you and help you through both your JD Edwards instance and your scalability solution 100%.

Operational Savings and Comparisons

But are there any operational savings like fewer errors or maybe even less training that might show up? They might not show up on an invoice.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I I think your accuracy matters, right? And as you because we're built we're building our flows based on on the backbone of JD Edwards applications, right? Um that that certainly reduces you know the idea of of air and I think it's also uh more readymade to to recognize any issues in the system as well. Uh I think when you just from my experience if you have a solution that's kind of outside or set set to the side of Oracle JD Edwards right you may or may not be able to kind of have insight into what data accuracy is looking like whereas we're kind of plugged into right inside of JD Edwards. So you're going to know your data accuracy pretty immediately for sure. I agree with that.

Yeah, and there might be a training side of that too, like what we talked about when it's on you, when it's on your prem premise, premises, whatever. Uh, you might have to control it more. You might not have that additional support or you have to pay for it. So, you might have to hire new people that are coming in so that they can actually be there and help you out. So, if there is something that goes down, that's a do or die situation, you have to have somebody that's there on hand.

Yeah, there might be an additional cost that comes up to it that might actually show up on an invoice but in a different way.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that resource planning, right? And this and this is true. I think I mentioned earlier depending on how complex your solution is, you're you're certainly going to want to have the resources that can handle um if things go sideways. If you have a a runaway workflow or runaway data and you you kind of don't know what's going on, the more complex that solution is, that resource that's going to help you is pretty critical. And is that resource on your team or is that some resource you're going to have to pay? For sure. Uh yeah, that that's definitely something that needs to be thought about as as you're as you're as you're thinking about this whole solution.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean both I'm sure you've met some of the core tech people as well that are great 247 help that like help people. They they are fantastic what they do.

Yes. and some of the most knowledgeable people in our business, which honestly I wasn't really expecting until I actually had the great pleasure of talking with Chris Egan for a while. That dude can talk your ear off about any number of topics, but also scanability. Um, and it's very impressive what they have truly built in that side of it.

Absolutely. Um, and obviously they help across our entire business, not just scanability, but they are very knowledgeable about scanability. But how does scanability, like I've said that a bunch this episode, but talked about it anyways, but how does scanability compare costwise to legacy or even third-party barcode tools in the JD Edwards space?

Well, I think it it goes back to kind of what we've talked about before, right, earlier in in in the podcast where we were talking about the differences kind of between a SAS solution and a traditional solution. So your your upfront costs are clearly going to be different when you go with a SAS solution, right? Um and you're going to have what but the nice is that what you get what you get with that, right? You're getting you're getting your um updates, maintenance, scalability, DR, all that's kind of baked in. Whereas with when you start talking about the costs associated with those things from a traditional perspective, those are things you have to cover. Those are things that you have to prepare for. And so I think I think I mentioned you this when we talked earlier this week that you've got about a 3 to 5 year window, you know, where your upfront costs for your your SAS is going to be up there. It'll be higher, but there's going to be that point when you cross over and you kind of you've made it into that that promised land of you you've paid your dues and you're you're you're in it. um for so for sure there is there's reasons to certainly nitpick you know what you want to do as as a solution as a company but um I think obviously your upfront costs are going to be less but in the in the and the annual cost might be more but as you go down the road you're going to you're going to hit that 3 to 5 year mark and you're going to transition and that that's probably also going to be true depending on what you choose to solve right how many workflows you're going to run and how many people you're going to have within the system and whatnot but Um I think I think that I think that answers the question.

Closing 

No, it definitely does. And I mean when you Yeah, when you truly look at it, yeah, if you don't want to upgrade for the next 5 years or seven years or whatever, I mean yes, you are putting yourself in a later release. So you might not have all the new tools and new applications that uh Oracle is coming out with year after year after year. But at the same time, like yeah, with scannability, yeah, you can always upgrade. There's that flexibility to it. But yeah, once you get to the three, five year mark, if you haven't upgraded, maybe going with a one-time cost is the better way.

I mean, we don't have to talk about the time value of money and what that means. But, you know, there, you know, how the economy is going right now. I mean, you know, maybe maybe there's a positive there. I don't know,

right?

I think it's it's certainly specific to your needs and what you're what you're what you're comfortable with and what you're what what you know you you can solve. And I I think as we've said this whole this whole show like it's flexible and you can choose what how you want to solve that problem. And if you want to if you want to adjust you can do that. And that's so much easier to do when on prim it's it's harder. It's more um you're a little bit more static for sure. Yeah.

And for some businesses that's completely okay. And if you want to go that way, completely go that way. But if you want to explore scannability, talk to Steve's team. Visit erpsweets.com to download our pricing. We have a great new pricing sheet that's up there right now. It's on scannability. Uh very easy to get to under our products page, but it'll tell you exactly what the costs are. Breaks it down just like Steve has for us today. But you can request a demo, schedule a one-on-one with Steve or any one of his team. But it's time to stop guessing and start playing it.

But thanks for tuning in to Not Your Grandpa's JD Edwards. If today's episode helped shed some light on the true cost of mobile barcode scanning, share with your ops team or your IT director. Don't forget to like, subscribe, drop a comment with your biggest question about barcode automation. We will be answering those if you do have any questions. But until next time, optimize boldly, automate wisely, and keep building a smarter ERP. Thank you.