J.D. Edwards will go live in the next few weeks with its Supply Chain Business Modeler (SCBM) for manufacturers and distributors. Now in beta testing, the tool is designed to consolidate data from different applications into a single data warehouse. As such, it provides a single view of all supply-chain information from different systems.
The goal is to reduce total cost of ownership and increase ROI by helping companies achieve faster, more efficient integration of their business processes across the supply chain.
The new business modeler brings into the mix data from a company’s suppliers and customers, according to Ed Sitarski, vice president for supply-chain planning at J.D. Edwards. “Any customer with multiple ERP systems needs to model aspects of the supplier or customer, and the need exists across all vertical markets,” Sitarski told CRM Buyer. In the past, he added, ERP systems for internal operations did not usually represent supplier and customer data, so custom integration was often required.
“You need a consistent, accurate vision of what is happening at the different distributors and other trading partners,” AMR Research senior analyst Louis Columbus told CRM Buyer.
Out of the Box
As an out-of-the-box solution, the SCBM automatically manages data that is shared by planning, order management, multi-mode manufacturing and logistics applications.
“It’s an active data warehouse on steroids,” Meta Group vice president Dwight Klappich told CRM Buyer. “It’s more than a data mart where you can house data, figure out where to find it, and bring it in and organize it. The technology allows for updating data regularly, organizing it and passing it off to the planning process.”
In addition, the supply-chain data hub helps identify and integrate sources of information not only within the J.D. Edwards application suite, but also in other applications. Indeed, 70 percent of J.D. Edwards’ customers have non-J.D. Edwards CRM or ERP applications, according to Sitarski. “The business-modeling tool acts as a common model.”
One View, Different Systems
The tool, along with J.D. Edwards’ Distributed Object Messaging Architecture, also will provide key performance indicators and predictors.
“Having a single view helps in collecting key performance indicators, for example, whether suppliers and customers are performing to plan,” Sitarski said. “You can also do system-wide optimization across supply-chain modules with all the data at once.” Past methods for accomplishing this were not cost-effective because “the data was all over the place,” he added.
Gleaning measures of performance across the channel is the future for partner relationship and channel management, AMR’s Columbus said. “Companies are trying to pull themselves out of the complacency of not having that. They need key performance indicators, and they need to look at what’s happening up and down the supply chain.”
The trend is toward integrated planning systems, Klappich added, noting that Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft have tightly integrated their supply-chain and ERP systems.
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