Products and people took the focus at this year’s Blueprint 4D Conference in Dallas, Texas. ERP Suites’ Director of JD Edwards Technology, Frank Jordan, gives us the inside scoop on the premier annual Oracle event, held May 8-11.
Oracle Remains Invested in JD Edwards
“[Oracle is] coming out with so much feature functionality for JD Edwards products that I have trouble keeping up with it,” said Jordan.
“The rate of enhancements and new features isn’t slowing down. To me, that’s a big, big tell there, and it’s getting richer and richer as time goes on.”
Jordan also noticed Orchestrator sessions continuing to be a hot topic. Attendance was up for his session and others centered around JDE Orchestrator. ERP Suites uses Orchestrator to seamlessly integrate our products – Mobility, Scanability, and Clarity – with JD Edwards. Just as Oracle continues to invest in JDE, we also pride ourselves on continuous enhancements, inspired by our own CNCs.
Frank’s Orchestrator Tech Tips from Blueprint 4D
In addition to attending sessions, Jordan himself was a presenter, giving an overview of EnterpriseOne Architectures with a specialized focus on Orchestrator Studio installation, features and tips.
Orchestrator Studio Tools Takeaways:
- Available from 9.2.2.x+ onward
- Notifications are very useful to provide alerts/messages for certain activities/levels within EnterpriseOne
- Oracle support Doc ID 2310904.1 provides several useful “Getting started” and references regarding notifications and schedules
- Provides a good method to alert E1 and sometimes non-E1 users of certain events that can be of value to them. Many examples such as alerts of low inventory, purchase order approval amounts/number, batch jobs going to Error status, etc.
- Be careful placing special characters in message body such as $ or \. Doc ID 2476365.1 has additional info and bug has been entered to correct this in tools 9.2.3.4
- If scheduling notifications, pay attention to _GLOBALNODE configuration, which in some customer configurations may have opportunities. Review E1: ORCH: Scheduler Setup
“One of the things I brought up in my tech tips was when you go and take these newer JD Edwards releases, you need to go back and rationalize or revisit some of the code that you’ve done,” said Jordan.
“Because in a lot of circumstances, you have some cases where when you go back and revisit it, 50% of the code you had, you don’t have to do it down in the scripting languages anymore. You can now do it in orchestration. So you streamline and reduce the complexity and the chance for errors and things like that.”
Public clouds for JDE put in face time
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure were all present and accounted for at Blueprint. ERP Suites maintains partnerships with Oracle, AWS and Azure. Currently, our expertise is in high demand with AWS, whereby ERP Suites is enlisted to perform Oracle license assessments.
“We can do things more nimbly and faster within Oracle Cloud because they’re giving us that increased feature functionality,” said Jordan.
“Oracle has been able to redesign,” said Jordan. “They have what they call a version 2 of their cloud solutions, so they re-architected everything, which makes a big difference, too.”
Blueprint 4D Attendance on the rise
Attendance at Blueprint was robust, helped in no small part by the continued retreat of the global pandemic. More than 1500 people attended the four-day conference, representing 788 total customers and 313 companies.
‘I think this was one of the best Blueprints as far as customer attendance,” said Jordan. “A number of younger, fresher, new faces – I met quite a few people that I had not met before, so that was neat to see. It’s nice to see some new faces and some new ideas and things like that coming in.”
With JD Edwards support extended through 2034, the demographic of the typical Blueprint attendee and JD Edwards expert in general will only continue to be wide-ranging. And the proliferation of technical support provided by the Orchestrator Studio only adds to that diversity of employee experience.
“Seeing 20-and 30-somethings – again, the orchestrator is helping open the doors so that leverages some of the newer tools of this 25-plus-year-old software,” said Jordan. “Coming out of college, you’re going to see kids that have Java skills, skills for designing webpages, things of that nature. So, by using those tools, they can still work with JD Edwards using the tools they’ve learned.”
JDE HCM SIG
On the Human Capital Management side of the conference was Marta DiDomenico, ERP Suites’ Director of HCM. DiDomenico has 28 years of experience with JDE HCM working in the managed services and business advisory groups, and echoed Jordan’s sentiments about the impressive scope of attendance this year.
“What I liked about Blueprint is that there was a good number of attendees,” said DiDomenico.
This year’s Blueprint set record attendance numbers, as noted above, and program numbers, too: over 450 education sessions and five distinct programs.
“They were good sessions,” said DiDomenico. “I attended the special interest group for HCM and it’s interesting to note that there’s a lot of companies out there that use JD Edwards HCM, because the SIG session was really crowded and in my session I had about 18 people which is huge for HCM representing about 12 different companies.”
On the Blueprint 4D exhibitor floor
With more than 1500 attendees, the exhibitor floor this year at Blueprint was jam-packed. Scott Volpenhein, ERP Suites’ director of marketing, held down the fort at the ERP Suites booth throughout the conference.
“We had so many ERP Suites partners and customers stop by the booth to chat and check out our products,” said Volpenhein. “The incredible amount of activity on the floor led to some great conversations about our products, particularly Scanability.”
We took advantage of the space and audience to demo our Scanability product right on the exhibitor floor. We set up a few barcodes in our booth to show potential customers how Scanability uses Orchestrator to quickly perform flows, and show the changes in real time, through our demo JDE environment.
Looking ahead to Blueprint 4D 2024
The 2023 Blueprint 4D Session gave ERP Suites plenty to consider and keep in mind moving forward throughout the rest of the year. The 2024 Blueprint 4D Conference will again be held in Dallas, Texas, May 7-10.
