J.D. Edwards Barrels AheadJ.D. Edwards Barrels Ahead

J.D. Edwards & Co.'s turnaround continued last week, as it revealed two major wins for its J.D. Edwards 5 enterprise software suite. Food and dairy cooperative Land O'Lakes Inc. and gas-instrumentation manufacturer FWMurphy both said they would install parts of the software suite with an eye to improving business operations. Earlier this month, Cray Inc. said it would install J.D. Edwards customer-relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and business-intelligence software.

In an expansion of its J.D. Edwards platform, FWMurphy is installing several CRM tools and beefing up its supply-chain capabilities with the Demand Consensus and Order Promising applications. FWMurphy will spend about $750,000 on the J.D. Edwards implementation, says Mitch Myers, the company's VP for operations.

The CRM installation includes software that J.D. Edwards acquired a year ago through its $81.7 million purchase of YOUCentric Inc. That technology played a big part in his company's choice of J.D. Edwards as a CRM vendor, Myers says. The fact that much of the software that J.D. Edwards acquired from YOUCentric is Java-based makes its CRM applications more agile than those offered by some other vendors, he says. "It gives us flexibility in terms of integration that you don't see in a lot of other platforms."

By integrating supply-chain and CRM applications, J.D. Edwards says, users can more easily create a single database for both types of information, speeding data retrieval. "The line between CRM and supply-chain management software is blurring, so customers want software that's easy to integrate across those areas," says Joel Reed, director of CRM product marketing at J.D. Edwards. CRM applications account for 15% to 25% of the company's total revenue, Reed says. J.D. Edwards 5 consists of seven product lines, ranging from collaboration and integration tools to supplier-relationship management software. To ease integration with other applications, the suite features built-in support for IBM's WebSphere Web-services software.

Cray will run the J.D. Edwards software on Sun Microsystems servers and use the applications to improve customer service and marketing intelligence, the company says. Ultimately, Cray hopes the software will let it reduce costs by driving down inventory levels. Land O'Lakes, meanwhile, expanded its software-licensing agreement with J.D. Edwards to include an ERP module; it's using the vendor's supply-chain management and CRM products.

The deals are part of what appears to be a comeback for J.D. Edwards, which earlier this year reported strong year-over-year earnings growth on a 9% increase in sales for its third quarter. It posted net income of $9.5 million on sales of $229.0 million, compared with a $185.9 million loss on sales of $209.4 million a year ago. License revenue was up 10% from a year earlier. "Our third-quarter results validate that the turnaround of J.D. Edwards continues to build momentum," J.D. Edwards chairman, president, and CEO Bob Dutkowsky said at the time.