In conjunction with Oracle’s JD Edwards Summit being held this week in Broomfield, Colorado, Oracle has announced a second phase of mobile access applications that are being made available for the specific JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications suite.  These include:

• Mobile Requisition Self Service Approval – designed to provide real-time transaction processing access for the review, approval or rejection of requisitions.
• Order Approval Mobile Purchase – Helps enable mobile workers to review and approve purchase orders regardless of physical location.
• Mobile Sales Inquiry – Addresses the needs of sales representatives, service technicians and managers by providing access to sales orders, item availability and item base price on-demand.

Each of these applications will now support smartphone enablement to include the Apple, Android and Blackberry specific platforms.

Supply Chain Matters had the opportunity to speak with Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice-President and General Manager Lyle Ekdahl regarding this week’s announcement, and we were especially interested as to why Oracle elected to have its premiere mid-market ERP offering lead the charge for mobile computing enablement, particularly in supply chain related applications.  Ekdahl’s response was that mid-market companies are just as challenged with reduced staffing and doing more with less, forcing many supply chain functional teams to be much more mobile in their day-to-day business activities.  When the JDE customer councils prioritized areas for needed future enhancements, mobile support was at the top of the list. This week’s announcement is the second iteration from a prior announced support of Apple iPad enablement  made at Oracle Open World last Fall. Ekdahl also noted that there will be several waves of JDE mobile enablement over the next 18 months. He also clarified that each of Oracle’s ERP product lines will have separate rollout strategies relative to mobile enablement.

We still find it interesting that that the JDE suite is currently leading Enterprise Business Suite in this area. Meanwhile, SAP and Microsoft continue to be low-key on their respective supply chain applications mobility strategies and support for customers.

The needs for select mobility enablement among certain supply chain business processes is a growing need and it is interesting to observe how the major ERP providers select processes and applications for mobility support.  Security of information however, will continue to remain a rather important requirement for businesses deploying more mobility features.

Bob Ferrari

E2Open has just announced the release of its Multi-Tier Cost Management application which was designed to orchestrate bill-of-material and product cost collaboration among an extended network of brand owners, contract manufacturers and suppliers.

In conjunction with this announcement, Supply Chain Matters viewed a demonstration of this new application several weeks ago.  The application allows supply chain procurement and buying teams the ability to propagate multiple product costing scenarios among an external network and was initially designed for E2Open’s high tech and consumer electronics client base. What impressed us the most was the means to leverage an alternative way of sharing product lifecycle and management data across the extended supply chain, since PLM (product lifecycle management) technology is typically deployed in a single tier of users.  This could pave the way for a more cost-affordable alternative for externally sharing this data rather than paying for extended PLM user licensing. The application potentially opens the door to leveraging PLM beyond just engineering and into more operational tactical utilization such as sourcing landed cost and broader transformational cost management purposes among trading partners.

The user interface for this application is straight-forward and the screens are relatively easy to understand. Cost data is extracted from any resident PLM system, users can elect different forms of cost management analysis, and an audit trail of changes is provided, helping product management teams to garner a perspective of change activities.

The announcement also represents efforts from a relatively new E2Open management steering team to invest more in internal development of network applications vs. reliance on other external partner applications. As an example, last year there were overt signs that E2Open and Kinaxis would build a stronger technology relationship but that effort seems to have subsided in favor of this internal development strategy.

Beyond high-tech industry -focused clients, it remains to be seen whether E2Open will also invest in the more stringent requirements among its Aerospace industry networks.

Bob Ferrari

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