They say first impressions last, and that seems never truer than when it comes to the impressions of the JD Edwards Blend module. Issues and shortcomings with the module that were around in the beta and first release of Blend are still raised and commented on today, some 15 or so years later. It appears the first impressions of Blend were shared far and wide in the early days of the module and despite considerable development and improvements since then, they linger as misconceptions today. I will address six of these I hear most often. “There are too many screens and clicks needed” This is perhaps the most common complaint about Blend. And one of the most legitimate complaints off the shelf. However, since the original release, several “speed function” applications have been added to reduce the number of screens and tabs. What Oracle has really done in the last few years, though, is to focus on improving the User Experience by delivering a suite of “pers

Last week, Oracle announced the release of JD Edwards 9.2.5.3. This release includes a swag of functional enhancements across numerous processes and modules and quite a lot of tools updates to Orchestrator. Of particular interest to our clients are three enhancements to the Grower and Grower Contracts & Payments modules. Here’s what each of these enhancements deliver. Allow Harvest Dates to Overlap Previously the one block, or field, could not have start and end dates of separate harvests overlap (apart from using sub-blocks). This will be very useful for crops for which there are overlapping pre and post-harvest activities and costs. Previously, the post-harvest activities and costs would be recorded against the next harvest, or the pre-harvest activities against the prior, accepting that it is directionally correct. Here’s how a typical block and harvest would be set-up now. Here’s how the harvests can now be created, to more accurately reflect the growing cy

Two of the services we offer are, on the surface, very different: JD Edwards (JDE) implementation and support, and Lean-based Continuous Improvement programs. Recently, though, we had occasion to apply the principles of Lean to how we were dealing with a JDE customer. This customer, to whom we provide Managed Services (aka Support) for their JDE Grower and Grower Contracts modules, is planning a fairly large JDE upgrade, getting up to date on ESUs (aka bugs and enhancements) and tools (aka infrastructure). The customer asked how Azmera should be involved in the Grower component of the upgrade. Based on prior experience of upgrades gone badly, our consultant replied describing the various activities and deliverables that he felt were best practice in an upgrade like this. This included opportunities to leverage new functionality. He did add a note that these activities didn’t necessarily correspond to hours or cost and that he wasn’t trying to upsell. They should all be incl