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The time is long past when anyone would mistake J.D. Edwards for simply an ERP (enterprise resource planning) company, but when the software maker released J.D. Edwards 5, it clearly set out to extend its reach in other areas of the enterprise software market.
The Web-enabled, integrated family of offerings covers everything from ERP, supply chain management, and supplier relationship management to CRM, business intelligence and collaboration, and integration. It also features a tools and technology module. It "addresses a whole landscape of what it takes to run a business," Lenley Hensarling, Director of Interoperability at J.D. Edwards, told CRM Buyer Magazine.
Marketing in the Middle
Aimed at the medium to large enterprise market, J.D. Edwards 5 is designed to work with a company's existing legacy technology and lets the enterprise match components to its actual business needs. That is what Russ Berrie and Company is banking on.
The maker of plush toys and other gifts recently selected J.D. Edwards 5 to "do a better job providing and sharing information," particularly with its sales force, Alan Hager, Russ Berrie vice president, information systems, told CRM Buyer. "We were already pretty good at processing transactions quickly," he explained, noting that the company usually ships an order within 48 hours after it has been placed.
Russ Berrie has homegrown VAX-based legacy systems and was looking for a thin-client solution that could accommodate them, working with an Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) database, Hager said.
After a comprehensive and exhaustive evaluation period, where every department sifted through the merits and drawbacks of four different vendor offerings and ranked their functionality as to whether they met, exceeded or fell below the company’s needs, Russ Berrie ultimately selected J.D. Edwards 5 because "it is very intuitive, which is important to our people, and very flexible."
Parts of a Whole
J.D. Edwards 5 enables companies to develop Web services, which in turn will allow them to use the Internet to share data, applications and business processes. "Certainly, for our forecasts, there is less spending around applications and more around services," Karen Smith, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, told CRM Buyer.
According to the company, the CRM module offers end-to-end
management of the customer 
lifecycle. It features self-service,
sales force automation,
partner relationship management (PRM),
marketing automation, an advanced order
configurator and field service capabilities.
The SCM module integrates J.D. Edwards Advance planning with order
fulfillment software while the SRM offering is designed to improve
the relationship between a company and its suppliers.
Smith said it is significant that JDE is playing in the PRM space, which is growing rapidly. "It needs more vendors, and there is room for better, more sophisticated applications to address integration," she explained.
An enterprise can collaborate with its customers, suppliers and partners via the eXtended Process Integration included in the collaboration and integration module. The Business Intelligence package offers a dashboard of gauges over the Web that lets users evaluate company performance.
A Slow Journey
J.D. Edwards lets the enterprise buy what it needs rather than pay a penalty for buying one piece and then have a significant integration cost when buying the next piece, Hensarling told CRM Buyer. He called JDE 5 a "three-year odyssey to structure data warehouse applications."
Smith said that JDE’s slow journey to a comprehensive suite works in its favor. It’s not something that was suddenly done and whittled down to meet the needs of the middle market where there is a lot of opportunity, she said.
Hensarling expects JDE 5 to attract not only mid-market companies but also to service very large organizations at the divisional level.
Bu J.D. Edwards faces competition on various fronts from the likes of PeopleSoft, SAP (NYSE: SAP), Siebel and Oracle, the latter of which is spread across a number of software disciplines and offers its own e-commerce suite, 11i. And there are some other challenges as well. JDE has tried to guard against turning the suite into "a monolithic thing, especially [for customers] who only want to consume bite-size pieces," Karl Johnson, vice president of CRM Strategy at JDE, told CRM Buyer.
Like other vendors, JDE has to deal with sales cycles that are becoming
extended and people who are more conservative about making decisions, he
added.
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