Tag Archive for: eCommerce data to JDE

Oracle JD Edwards and B2B eCommerce Integration for efficient online sales

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information

The Synergy of JD Edwards and B2B E-commerce

Oracle’s JD Edwards software (also JD Edwards EnterpriseOne or World) is an excellent software solution for mid and large size enterprises. This ERP (or enterprise resource planning) system is a central tool to help companies run their business. Usually, most organizations using JDE ERP software, are somehow engaged in B2B activities, such as doing business with wholesalers, retailers, or distributors…

Wikipedia’s definition of B2B E-commerce is “B2B e-commerce (also written as e-Commerce, eCommerce or similar variants), short for business-to-business, electronic commerce, is selling products or services between businesses through the internet via an online sales portal”.

In other words, it is B2B transactions that are happening online, over a B2B portal. The difference from an online B2C store that it addresses a company, and not an individual consumer.

According to Statista.com, the global B2B eCommerce market valuing US$12.2 trillion in 2019 is over 6 times that of the B2C market.

JDE e-commerce integration

The data of e-commerce market is impressive, but B2B e-commerce isn’t just for big companies. Many small and mid-size businesses also thrive in B2B e-commerce sales. Despite the size of the company, there is one common thing between all successful B2B e-commerce organizations – the Systems Integration.

B2B eCommerce customer loyalty

B2B eCommerce market is becoming hypercompetitive. Online customers today have high expectations, similar to the B2C (business-to-consumer e-commerce) market.

Business customers are demanding increasing levels of service and convenience. They are pressuring to quickly find the right products and faster way to process orders to support their workloads.

The e-commerce site or B2B portal, is becoming an extension of the business; therefore, for a better customer interaction and user experience, the B2B portal should be integrated without failure into the ERP system. As it is well known already, companies today adopt different kinds ERP, inventory management and supply chain systems… This makes it hard to manage data flow between those heterogenous systems. It influences negatively the shopping experience of a B2B customer.

Based on the above, and in order to overcome such challenges, companies have no choice other than adopting the seamless and real-time Systems Integration.

Benefits of B2B eCommerce Integration with JDE

Following are some of the benefits integration may bring to the company:

  • Allows everyone in a company to have the consistent information and immediate access to data such order history for example, in a real-time mode
  • Helps e-commerce companies to better serve their customers and grow online sales.
  • Helps companies increase their profits
  • Reduces company’s cost per transaction.
  • Better performance in year-over-year growth for revenue and product sales as well as increased growth of new customers.

Oracle JD Edwards Integration with Magic xpi

You’ve probably heard that integrating an eCommerce system with Oracle JD Edwards can be complicated, but it’s not the case if you use Magic xpi integration platform.

Organizations adopting Magic xpi for its Integration projects, can fully leverage the features provided in this API driven platform with certified connectors, to optimize the benefits from their eCommerce and JDE ERP software.

Magic xpi integration platform has more than 50 adapters, wizards, services, and methods enable companies to create continuous business processes based on JD Edwards business functions and helps enhance communication between e-commerce company and their online customers.

Driving innovation in your B2B eCommerce with Magic xpi

Magic xpi has an excellent JD Edwards connector, certified by Oracle themselves. It is able to discover JDE pre-built business functions or work directly with the Z-files of JDE.

It is API driven middleware that enables integration and orchestration of flows, business processes based on events and other multitude types of triggers. Adopting Magic xpi for integration projects, allows a company to benefit from the following advantages:

• Improve the quality of customer service. You can connect eCommerce, CRM, support, shipping, social media and more from the same integration platform, without any coding or programming requirements

• Speed processes and increase the productivity due to automatically synchronizing Work Orders, Bills of Materials, Return Merchandise authorizations and more across systems.

• Synchronize data, such as names, locations and product catalogs, between JD Edwards EnterpriseOne or JD Edwards World and other systems.

• Permit mobile workforce solutions for Order Entry, Proof-of-Delivery, Field Service apps, and more.

Oracle JD Edwards Connector Capabilities

  • Visual mapping between source and destination for business functions
  • Drag and drop: no coding required
  • Handles exceptions and errors, reliably and seamlessly
  • Integrates financial data in real time, near real time, and at optimal intervals
  • Integrates non-JDE applications with your JDE simply
  • Integrates with new and existing e-commerce websites
  • Integrates order tracking and logistics management over the Web
  • Integrates CRM and sales force management
  • Handles service calls and tracks orders over the Web
  • Runs natively on IBM I systems
  • Consolidates your charts of accounts with other systems and companies

 Oracle JD Edwards Connector Benefits

  • Creates services easily
  • Implements SOA with existing JD Edwards Enterprise One or JD Edwards World
  • Leverages investment in and knowledge of JD Edwards systems
  • Simplifies integration when upgrading or installing new versions
  • Overcomes integration barriers with existing systems
  • Modernizes the perception of JD Edwards applications
  • Integrates JD Edwards company-wide across all business processes, according to business process definitions
  • Empowers end users and technical staff
  • Increases efficiency through reliable and seamless handling of exceptions and errors
  • Allows access to information when you need it

Leave e-commerce integration to the experts

You don’t need to be an Integration expert in order to improve your business. By choosing EDI2XML and Magic xpi, you’ll have complete systems integration, enjoy ease of maintenance, and benefit from a high return on investment.

Free consultation ecommerce JDE integration

For more helpful information about JDE read our posts:

Oracle JD Edwards Integration: the key to Digital Transformation

The Definitive Checklist for Oracle JDE and EDI Integration Projects

EDI or E-commerce Integration with Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise

Download JD Edwards Integration brochure

The Definitive Checklist For Oracle JDE and EDI Integration Projects

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.

Article written by Pierre Namroud, EDI Integration Specialist & Business Consultant

I had the pleasure of attending Collaborate17, a Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle community. This opportunity brought together Oracle professionals, integrators, project managers and IT experts from around the world, who all work in different spaces of integration. It was such a great experience speaking with so many Oracle experts and attending educational sessions.

One of the main points of discussion during the various speaking engagements was on the challenges that professionals were facing when it came to integration projects involving EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) as well as eCommerce data to JDE (JD Edwards). The opinions were unanimous in the sense that Oracle still has more work to be done in order to strengthen and simplify integration with legacy EDI protocols and build simpler integration flows for protocols such as X12, EDIFACT, Rosetta Net, etc.

I’m writing this article, in order to share my own expertise as a data and EDI integrator, where I had the chance to be involved in several eCommerce and EDI integration projects with Oracle JDE. Hopefully it will help inform other Oracle professionals looking to overcome some of these integration challenges.

Challenges currently being faced by Oracle JDE professionals

There are many challenges that any JDE professional might see when it comes to data and systems integration with Oracle ERP software in general, whether for on-premises or cloud systems. [As a side note, Oracle’s cloud systems have their own specific limitations that I recently learned about during one of the Collaborate Sessions].

Below, I have listed some of the most common challenges that not only have I experienced in my own projects with Oracle customers but that others have expressed during the Collaborate conference;

  • Oracle’s JDE does not have a seamless built-in integration with all EDI X12 documents “out of the box”.
  • The current integration process for EDI X12, EDIFACT, HL7 or any other data format now happens by writing into transition tables (or Z files) and then triggering a business function to process those incoming data.
  • Even though Oracle’s JDE system supports business functions, some older versions do not support new API functions, which can cause some headaches.

    Looking to integrate your EDI or eCommerce processes with Oracle JDE enterprise one, look no further, since we have the best integration option where we turn your Oracle JDE system into a modern REST API, that receives https requests and acts accordingly. Learn More>

Integration Project Checklist

Before starting an integration project with your Oracle JDE system, I recommend that you go through the following list of questions. This way, you’ll be able to make the best decisions to move forward with development efforts as efficiently as possible.

  • Who are the Business or Trading Partners you want to exchange electronic data with?
  • Which documents (or types of data) are you requested to exchange from your Business Partners? In normal circumstances, they’ll provide you with the necessary documentation and specifications as a road map and for compliance reasons.
  • The exchanged data will be sent under what format or standard/version? (X12, EDIFACT, RosettaNet, XML, custom format…?)
  • What is the protocol of communication used to send the data back and forth between you and your Business Partner? Is it point-to-point, such as AS2 or sFTP?
  • Is a VAN required in order to transport the data?
  • Do you have the necessary expertise to select the appropriate certified communication software (for first time project implementation)?
  • Do you have the necessary expertise in your development team to decrypt and understand the terminologies of legacy EDI formats?
  • Has your team ever done an EDI integration project, that includes a full certification process?
  • How many partners will you be exchanging with? The more partners you have, the more complex the project can become.
  • Check the specs of all of your partners (when possible) to verify the differences in their requirements. It is well known in the EDI integration world that there can be many distinctions and exceptions found per Business Partner and per document. Every EDI project can be unique.
  • What is the lead-time to complete the certification and testing phase with your business partner before going live?
  • What is the volume of exceptions that your development team can currently handle in the project in order to be on time and within budget?
  • Do you have the necessary integration tools to simplify the EDI syntax in order to work with one format regardless of the format of the data you receive from different sources?
  • Is your team coding directly in Oracle JDE native framework, or are you using any efficient integration tool available today?
  • Will you be doing end-to-end integration using Z tables of Oracle JDE, or you are going to use API (or business functions) of JDE?

Recommendations for a Successful Integration Project

As you might have noticed, data integration projects involving legacy EDI protocols or custom data format exchange are not simple. They are projects that need a lot of expertise and experience in data communication and transportation, data mapping and systems integration into Oracle’s JDE system.

Moreover, at most enterprises that we’ve completed EDI integration projects for, it was evident how stretched and overwhelmed the internal JDE development team was in their own day-to-day operations, support and maintenance of the application and were incapable of learning new standards to respect the strict timeline given by Trading Partners. In these cases, they looked for help from an outside Service Provider, such as EDI2XML.

My recommendations for such projects are as follows:

  • Outsource the EDI part of the project to a reliable Service Provider, who is highly focused on service availability and quality, since EDI is quite sensitive. This will allow your team to continue working on their daily tasks and keep doing what they do best (JDE support and maintenance, for example). This way, you’ll have a simplified and streamlined EDI integration process; you build one tunnel between your EDI provider, where they deal with the exceptions, and your own process.
  • In case your company policy requires you to deploy the EDI integration solution on-premises, make sure to use an efficient EDI conversion tool such as our EDI2XML technology that has the capability to turn the EDI documents from X12 format to a human readable XML format, for example.
  • Equip your team with the right tools for data integration such as Magic xpi, which we have been using for many years in our data and systems integration projects. Leveraging such technologies allowed us to integrate anything-to-anything (JDE to SAP, SAP to Salesforce, EDI to any system as examples).

I sure hope I was able to expose the most common EDI integration challenges and complexities and help you to overcome these obstacles with the above checklist and recommendations.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic or any other issue related to EDI integration projects, please click on the image below and I will be more than happy to contact you personally for a FREE consultation.

 

Free consultation ecommerce JDE integration