J.D. Edwards Pushes Forward With New Products Amidst Questions Over Its FutureJ.D. Edwards Pushes Forward With New Products Amidst Questions Over Its Future

Amid all the noise about PeopleSoft's plan to acquire J.D. Edwards & Co., and Oracle's attempt to take over PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards is marching along with more than 400 new products and enhancements at its annual Quest user conference in Denver.

The product news centers around the J.D. Edwards 5 line of enterprise resource planning software. Much of the focus this year is on supply-chain management tools, says Lenley Hensarling, group VP of product management for J.D. Edwards. Designed to optimize information sharing between buyers and suppliers, J.D. Edwards 5 SCM now includes new functionality for planning, order management, manufacturing, distribution, and logistics.

There's a new business modeler that is designed to help companies more easily implement the software. "We've made it a lot easier to provide data feeds and to map data from transaction systems back into the supply-chain planning systems, but [the business modeler] also works with a set of wizards that run people through sets of questions," says Hensarling.

J.D. Edwards also showcased enhancements that are designed to help vertical industries. For example, it will roll out upgrades to J.D. Edwards 5 for consumer goods companies, including functionality for pricing and promotion management, inventory and order management, enhanced lot control, cross docking, and profit-management capabilities.

"We've done a lot of work on promotions and on pricing," Hensarling says. Now, when a consumer packaged-goods manufacturer wants to run a promotion in retail stores, such as a three-for-one special, there are tools that will help it track and manage how well the special promotion does.

In the J.D. Edwards 5 CRM product line, the company has added a series of tools designed to help customers more accurately target promotions and up-sell to existing customers. New mini-portals, or portlets, as J.D. Edwards calls them, enable customers' sales reps to personalize their CRM matrix portal page to meet specific needs.

J.D. Edwards also made several partnership announcements, including an agreement with IBM and Deloitte & Touche to work together to develop a vertical solution for the life sciences industry. "We know how to make software and understand how to construct financials and manufacturing applications," says Hensarling. "Both IBM and Deloitte & Touche have groups that totally focus on the life sciences sector. We're getting access to that deep vertical domain expertise not from just one company, but two."