Modernization Deep Dive: Widgets, User Experience & Operational Insights

 

This session dives into badges, meters, charts, and text boxes, demonstrating how widgets leverage the power of orchestrations to turn JDE and external API data into meaningful visualizations. Through live examples and practical use cases, see just how quickly you can create tailored dashboards that give executives and teams an at-a-glance view of the information that matters most.

Transcript

All right, we'll get started.

So thanks everyone for joining.

If you joined last week, you know some stuff I'm about to say, but this is our our second of at least 7 modernization deep dive series presentations.

So our goal here is keep these short.

So they're just going to be till 12:30 Eastern half hour.

And we want to save at least 10 minutes at the end for Q&A.

So definitely stay, bring your questions.

You can ask them in the chat or if you want, I can unmute you.

Just raise your hand in in Webex and we'll do that.

And lastly, I just did the recording and Chris is not hearing me.

Are you guys hearing me?

Yes, Sir.

Kevin.

Yeah, yeah, there's audio.

I don't know why he's not hearing us.

So it is recorded.

I'll send that out to everybody here tomorrow.

So you should have that recording share with your team and whatnot.

So with that, we will get started.

So we have as much time as we can.

Kevin, if you or Gary, if you want to advance it real quick, just talk a little bit about it.

Earpiece suites, we are all things JD Edwards.

We are hosting managed services, technical and functional consulting, AI for JD Edwards and then a little bit outside JD Edwards, we we can do AI for your other enterprise systems and we have EPM practice.

So if you guys have EPM or interested in EPM, we do that as well.

So just a real quick blurb there about us and then I will turn it over to Gary.

So I've got Gary myself and then we have Kevin.

Kevin will be monitoring some of the chat and then we'll be here all of us for the questions at the end.

I will let you take it away, Gary.

Thanks, Scott.

Hi, I'm Gary Kroll.

I'm a senior technical developer here at ERP Suites.

My background is basically started developing in world back in 95 and been developing on everything since and everything in between.

So happy to be here and excited to do this for you guys.

All right, just a brief overview of what we're going to, what we're going to talk about what, what is a widget, the anatomy of a widget, the four types of widgets, 3 use cases where where we'll show, I'll show you some, some live demo of some stuff that I created actually this morning and just how easy it is to do.

And then governance and gotchas.

Some of the things, most of you, if you've, if you've been around it long enough or been an AIS, the governance and the gotchas are the same thing that you're that you're used to.

So what is a widget?

A widget is basically, in short, it's a watch list, but a lot better.

OK, you know how watch list you could it's account basically, right?

Watch this is account.

This you get a lot more than counting.

You get aggregation, you get math, you get anything an orchestration can do, a widget can present for you.

So just keep that in mind.

The, the biggest thing is, is the difference is, is the math and where the data comes from.

A query versus an orchestration.

It's it's packaged in, there's no license.

All of the good, good little bells and whistles that you don't have to need.

You don't need extra extra licenses, extra add-ons or anything.

OK, let's talk about watchlist versus a widget.

And I touched on that a second ago.

But the the biggest part of that is is the math where where a watch list just has, you know, it's over a query, over a safe query.

This is over an orchestration that can do aggregations, can do math, can do basically anything an orchestration can do.

They also appear anyway, just a note, they appear anywhere.

The badge widgets, which we'll talk about appear anywhere.

That watch list currently appear today.

But just think of a widget as the Big Brother and the next generation of the watch list.

OK, how a widget gets its data, It's three moving parts.

Orchestration is the underlying data gatherer, or collector, if you will.

The widget plus that is your presentation and then your delivery is where do you put it?

And you put it composed pages.

So the key, the key to the the widgets is the widget is not really the tool here.

I mean, the widget is the presentation layer for what's actually doing the work.

And that's the orchestration.

So everything the orchestration can do, just think of the widget as a as a presentation layer for that.

We have 4/4 widget types, the badge, which you know and see as a watch list, right?

That's that's just your, your numerical or text just displays everywhere.

That watch list display a meter, which is a gauge, that's a, that's a dynamic graphic display.

When it refreshes, you know you can see that meter move.

Depending on what you're looking at, that meter can move up and down and you can set, you know, priorities and parameters to show critical, you know, standard critical over those type things in the meter.

And there's different kinds of meters that you can do and we'll show you those as well.

Then you have a chart.

You've got, you know, all kinds of charts, bars, the graphs, the, the ones I prepared today was a pie chart.

So you can see a representation of that.

And then the last one is a text box.

It's a free form text.

It can be from an, from an AI generated summary.

It can be, you can have narrative content in it.

You can also have external data presented there.

So you got your badge, your meter, your chart and your text box and you're like, well, how would I use all these things and why?

And, and we'll get to those.

But no, no one thing is, is better than the other.

They just all have their their purpose and their use.

So going going into this, let's go over the different the different types that we have real quick what we'll look at.

Oops, sorry about that.

I'm going to switch my sharing for you so we can see the demo.

Right.

Does everyone see AIS Studio?

Yeah, you're looking good.

Yeah.

OK, good.

So let's talk about we'll go through and we'll look at the different type of type of widgets.

There are kind of how they're built and how they're constructed and then actually show you real live demonstration of what what something might look like in your organization and how you might use it.

So if we go in here and you can see I'm in the AIS studio.

So all your widgets, everything, it's all, it's all AIS based.

They've come through the widgets that that I did this morning for this.

And I actually just to tell you how how easy and user friendly it is, everything that we're seeing.

It took me about an hour to do.

Now, obviously you can get more complex and do different things, but the point is it's, it's very user friendly.

It's very easy to create.

So let's go to the, the badge one first.

OK, And this is just, I'm just kind of showing you the components and, and what you'll see when you come in the, the critical part here is and, and the important thing to note is when you create it, whatever you decide on here, you cannot change it.

So let's say you create a badge and like, oh, I want a meter.

Well, then the badge is no good.

You delete it and start over.

So that's just an important note.

Whatever you select at the beginning, the IT sticks and normal stuff, you got your title, your refresh interval, the default is 60 minutes.

It can go as low as 5.

But on all of these, and if if you're widgets and think about designing widgets or whatever, you'll know, you don't want to put something that's very heavy, very resource intensive on like a, you know, a 5 minute refresh rate that's just hitting every 5 minutes and just running all the time.

So, you know, you want to think about those on on your widgets and your presentations.

You want to think about keeping them as lean as possible and, and designing them as efficient as possible for for obvious reasons.

On on the badge, you can say it's a, a numeric and that's that's mostly what we're used to seeing on watch list is the numeric badges, but you can also do text and then there's number formatting that are you shorting format and around for you if you wanted.

So that's kind of like what, what is my widget here?

OK, this is this is like the attributes of it, right?

Then the next part is the data source.

OK, where is it going to get the data from?

And every widget will have an underlying orchestration.

So that means you would have already created your orchestration, tested it, make sure you get what you need out of it and those type things.

But basically you can see here it's you have all the, all the orchestrations that are shared out there.

So you've got all these, these are my personal ones that I created this morning.

So you would, you would select your orchestration and then once you once you've selected it, you can set your thresholds like my warning threshold.

And I've got a sending my warning threshold is 100.

My critical is 300.

So if I go above 100 past due orders, it's going to it's going to show as a warning.

OK.

And then once you create your widget with your underlying orchestration, you can preview it and you can see what your rendered widget will look like.

And so it's, it's it's warning here because I've got 101.

And then you can also see the widget output.

You know what it's doing, but the key is your orchestration output.

And see right here, you passed, that's what the orchestration is producing for this widget.

That's, that's your typical badge.

It's just straight up badge.

That's the the easiest one of them all are the ones that we're used to seeing.

Another one you can have is most ordered item quantity.

Same thing definition.

What is this?

It's a it's a badge numeric short number format and it automatically rounds for if you click the short number format, it automatically rounds for you.

And you can play around with these and see there's no harm in doing it.

When you preview, if you change something, you look at the preview and you can see the the results to it.

But again, you have an orchestration that it's, that it's under, that's under it.

And the, the good thing here is I'll touch on when you're in your widget and let's say you're the developer or the, the analyst who's doing this or whoever's doing it and you need to modify the orchestration under it.

They give you a QikLink that'll take you to edit the orchestration.

So it'll take you right to the orchestration and then come right back to the, to the widget.

So you can see here, this is a just a simple data request, right?

That's all this orchestration does.

So you can edit your orchestration and then come back, you know, come back to your widget and then again, we'll preview it.

You can see the the clean output and what you want on your, your orchestrations is and I'll show you an example.

I left it dirty in, in one of them as an example.

You want this output as clean as possible, so you just don't have to wade through things when you're selecting data.

But this is this represents 1.9 billion is my is my value here on that because of the single badge.

This is example where you get, you know, one item here, but then you can get also the same the name as well.

So it's it's there's my my quantity and and what it is.

And there's the most ordered item name is diesel fuel.

So you can see how they work.

You got an underlying orchestration that presents this for you.

And this is what if you create a dashboard scenario, this is what you would see right here in your dashboard.

And I'll show you an example of that.

And then you have another one, which is a chart type.

And here's all the different.

The charts are kind of cool, I think because they're a visual representation of everything that's going on.

And a lot of people don't, you know, me personally, I don't like to look at a bunch of data and try to figure out what's going on.

A nice visual representation of whatever I'm trying to display is, is a lot easier to see at a glance and in a dashboard type situation.

But again, this is a chart.

I selected a pie chart.

You can see the funnels, there is the lines and the bars and there's different nuances about each one of them that require some other ones require, you know, X&Y axis and things like that.

Normal chart stuff.

The data source again is an orchestration.

This is a purchase orders by business unit.

And here's where the power of the the aggregation comes in.

Because instead of account, I'm able to aggregate them and then display them in a percentage format where as a watch list you would not be able to do that.

And then the preview of it you can see right here.

So if I'm looking at my purchase orders by business unit, it's very easy to see who who's doing what, where my where my large values are, whether or not and you can see here's the orchestration output and the aggregation.

I'm going to show you one other thing on clean.

I left one dirty just so I can show you.

I don't remember which one I did, but it's OK.

OK.

See right here when I talked about you once, you're your orchestration as clean as possible.

These are the things that I care about.

This data here, and this is more system information.

If you don't want to see that system information, there's an easy way to clean that up.

So if you go to your underlying orchestration, you know this because this is something for me, I was like, I don't want all this noise coming through that I'm trying to display and weed through.

So you just go to your messages and these check boxes right here, you just turn them off.

There you go.

So it's just a lot cleaner.

And it's an easy way to do that by by default, when you create the orchestration, those messages on the outputs tab are there.

So me personally, I like when I'm looking at Jason structures, I like to look at that and only that.

I don't, I don't like to see the the rest of the noise in there.

So you want them as as clean as possible.

So that's the way to get rid of that.

You just go to the output sections and on the messages, just uncheck all the boxes, save it, and you're right back where you need to be.

OK, so now we we've covered all these widgets.

We've looked at the different widgets, right?

We looked at, you know, orchestrations that, that, that under all widgets.

So all the widgets that I displayed has, you know, these orchestrations under them, right?

So what does that mean and how, how would I use that?

That's kind of the question that everybody asks.

I've got this new thing.

How do I implement it and why would I use it?

And what's my use case?

So basically what you end up with is when you put all that together as you get logged out.

Sorry about that.

Get back in there.

So what that means is in a nutshell, this, this is your new dashboarding tool.

This is your new, you know, your Power BI, if you will.

This I can put as much or as little as I want here.

I named this badges, charts, external, just the types of widgets.

But this could be any information, whether it's financial distribution.

I mean, it's you can create anything and and you can create this dashboard scenario for like your executive.

This is what they want to see.

They don't want to have to go through all these places.

They want to go one place that shows them real time information.

In in a in in just one one single format, right?

So these are all of the all of the different orchestrations that and widgets that were under there.

You see it in dashboard format, plus your external sources doesn't have to all be from JD Edwards.

That's right.

So right here, my temperature was just displaying, but this this actually is this, this forecast is from the National Weather Service from the from the Greenville Spartanburg Weather Center.

Yeah.

So this is this is external.

That's a big one, though.

It's not just JDE data.

It's it's if you can go to an API and get data returned it, it's there.

So we're going to.

So pretty much anything with an API you can pull into that dashboard.

You can have one dashboard with your JD Edwards stuff plus these other connectors and have a cohesive dashboard with that information.

And we're going to go, we're going to go back to that and try to refresh here.

I don't know what happened to my Greenville temperature.

It may not be coming from them, but anyway, there's well, it's actually cool, but the the problem is it's it's 88, but the humidity makes feels like 112.

So it's it's good times 88's deceiving.

But anyway, that's that's kind of widgets in a nutshell.

But like at the end of the day, if I could say one thing about this is this is the dashboarding tool for anybody that needs to see a lot of information real time.

Basically the heartbeat of what I care about, whether it's financials, distribution, the whole company.

I mean there's so many different you can I mean, it's really just your imagination and and your use case and what you need, what you can put here.

So I mean, this dashboard can be filled with anything that that the CFO needs, the CEO needs, the CIO needs, maybe it's controllers, you know, looking at different things.

They want to monitor whatever or they're, you're monitoring inventories.

Maybe you're, you're logistics and procurement people are monitoring inventory levels of certain critical items that they, they want to be alerted when you know it, it, it's a goes below a certain point or something, you know, so there's just all kinds of all kinds of use cases.

And, and the last thing I'll say on it is it's, it's just so easy to do this.

And one other thing I wanted to show you on the widget side when, when you come down to the widgets, so I've for the orchestrations, I'm sorry.

And now I want to, I need AI need a widget for it, right?

I need to create this widget and I need to tie the two together.

Well, if you come here and you've created your, your orchestration, if you just go manage create widget, it does almost everything for you and sets you up for, OK, Now just what do you want to do?

And the data source is already selected for you.

So that's a, that's a cool feature that I thought was really, really nice.

So you don't have to go back and try to connect them all together.

You just hit manage create widget and, and you're good to go and it creates the widget for you.

And now they're all tied together and linked together.

So Gary, we got a question I know Kevin is handling on the chat, but if you want to talk about it, the question is can the widget be dynamic based on the user?

So for example, APO by business unit, if the user has a business unit security, would it only show their business unit?

Yeah, all security.

So all security.

That's a great question.

That's a really good question.

All the all the underlying security that exists is is still there all the JD over securities.

But then she also wouldn't show it.

She followed up and said, could the dynamic piece of it be based on something other than security like an address book category could?

Yeah, absolutely.

Can I take a minute and delve into that just for a second?

So if we come here and we look at like the data requests, right?

So if you're designing this, and I did, I did one of them like the the PO's by business unit, right?

We'll see right here.

You can select out like if you only wanted to show, I think that's what you're asking.

You only wanted to show certain business units, right?

Or certain things you can filter out your data that's actually going to the the widget from the orchestration.

Did that answer your question?

I'll show the chime in, but I so that's not really dynamic though.

That's something you're setting behind the scenes in the widget.

So you know, if you and I both go see the same widget, would it ever show different information based on our user?

It can.

It depends on how you design it.

Because so the widget in the orchestration and remember the widget layer is just the presentation for the orchestration.

So under the orchestration, if you not to get into orchestration construction, but after every piece you can pass in variables.

So you can pass in runtime variables and go get runtime variables for your orchestration and make it behave however you want to and then pass that into the next piece.

So does that?

I think that I think that does.

So yeah, you would have to set that dynamic information in the orchestration.

Then obviously the widget just presented, right.

So a lot of these are, you see, they're like the data requests are hard coded and things like that.

But if I was creating a true orchestration for this and needed different it it to behave differently, I would definitely make those dynamic and I would pass them either into the orchestration, pass them into the the next piece, the data request to keep it dynamic like that.

Yeah, yeah.

And she said yes, that makes sense.

So there we go.

So we got about 5-6 minutes left.

So you have to keep the questions coming.

Gary, I don't know if you have any more to show there if you want to switch back.

But another question is, can a user drill down into the underlying data from the widget?

Can the user drill down into the data from the widget?

So like right there in that pie chart, could you?

I don't, I don't, I don't think so, Not that I know of.

It's more of a representation.

Now you can I, I created this.

So for here I created an app call to it and it's just the basic goes out to the app.

So you could come out here and look for the data.

It it doesn't, to my knowledge it doesn't.

It doesn't allow you to pass in parameters to it, but I might be mistaken on that.

But I think that's the way it works.

But you can put an app there to call, but I there's not, to my understanding, there's not a data structure for it.

So kind of, yes, kind of know you can go to an app, but you can't.

It's not like a, it's not like a tab of the report or anything like that where you can actually click on it drills down into the exact data that makes up that field, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and then share the orchestration be running on scheduler to show the dynamic data or let's use or let's say update data on widget.

So the way that works is that your widget, if you remember we go back over here to the widgets, Yeah, a refresh.

So it's automatically going to pull that.

So if we go into the.

No, let's just let's go pick up my business unit.

So you got your refresh rate interval.

So you don't have to, you don't have to put the orchestration on scheduler.

This is basically your schedule.

Every 5 minutes it will run and refresh.

So basically the widget interacts with the orchestration.

The widget says every 5 minutes I need this to refresh in this orchestration to run.

So if you looked at the health monitor every 5 minutes, you'd see the underlying orchestration running.

Yeah, got it.

And they do have the ability to, if you come here, they have the ability to, to refresh the the widgets.

There's a little refresh, little icon that you can hit it.

You can do a refresh also.

It'll run them all.

So let's say I'm on a 60 minute interval, but I want to know now I can just hit refresh and it fires off that that orchestration.

So OK, we'll switch back to the if there's no more questions, we'll switch back to the slideshow.

Yeah, they just want to cover last little bit here about security and then wrap it up.

Oops, sorry.

So governance basically widgets are just UD OS.

They're UD OS like anything else, like you're used to to using.

So the same, the same type of, you know, checkout equals reserve, you know, check in equals published, then you approve and share.

Right now you can have personal ones that only show up to you, but most of the ones that would be created for someone else would be specific group you can only delete.

It's just like any other AIS stuff that you can only delete widgets, personal widgets from Studio and every other type of management has to be happened from P98220U.

For the UDOOMW it's it's the same.

So it's the same life cycle and governance that all Udos have.

They just gave us another object in it.

And then just thanks for remember, it's a UDO.

It's not an *** service.

It it it's just a presentation over the orchestration.

The orchestration is the that's the meat of it.

If you think of the widget is just a way to display a pretty display, a graphical display of what the orchestration, because the orchestration gives you a Jason output.

Most of us aren't going to go, OK, let me look at this Jason and find it.

So it's just a way to take that Jason and make it in a, in a easy to view impactful format for you.

And then the other, you know, the question that first came up about widgets, can I get outside data?

And the answer is yes, if you can access the API and get a return from that REST API, you can, you can definitely display that data.

All right, so we got another minute.

If there's any new questions left, we'll pull up the schedule for the rest of our series.

So next Tuesday week from today, we've got a rapid orchestration.

So we're going to continue talking about orchestrations rapid because we've got gosh, I don't even know how many are on there now, maybe 30 or so that are pre built ready to go.

We package them together, you get three of them and and they're the popular ones.

You probably fit your business.

So check that out and talk about those on next Tuesday the 25th.

Don't see any other questions, Gary, you're welcome.

OK, well, thank you, Joseph.

Chance for any more questions?

If not, we'll wrap it up and be done right on time.

Oh, we got a raised hand.

Maybe.

Let's see if that works.

You're welcome.

Yeah, Thank you, Gary.

Yep.

Enjoy it.

It's fun.

If you can unmute, you're able to ask your question.

I don't know.

We'll see.

They raised the hand.

Maybe it was an accident.

It might have been a clap.

There's a lot of claps coming through.

It might have been that might have might have been the clap.

That was a clap.

OK.

All right.

Well, thanks, Gary and thank you everybody for joining.

I'll send out that recording the tomorrow, I should say.

OK, thanks everybody.

Thanks.