Last week Oracle announced the General Availability of the Apparel Management product at the Asia Pacific OpenWorld in Beijing. This is an exciting new venture in the world of manufacturing and/or distribution of multi-attribute products. Think size, color, style but don’t limit your imagination to “jeans” this applies to shoes, sportswear and even some industrial products (we’ve heard people talking about steel) - anything that has “variations on a common product theme”.

Jireh is well placed to support this module as one of our key customers uses the third-party module on which Apparel Management has been based.

Lyle Ekdahl, Group Vice President, JD Edwards introduces Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Apparel Management and talks about the benefits to customers in this video clip:

Oracle's Profit magazine recently interviewed Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle Group Vice President for JD Edwards, in an article titled "Innovation, commitment, and loyalty the secrets to JD Edwards’ success".  In the interview Lyle describes how the JDE product has grown since it became part of Oracle five years ago and Oracle's ongoing commitment to it.

A key message from Lyle is: "Our customers have seen consistent investment in product innovation over the past five years, and we are delighted to have earned their loyalty. As part of Oracle, we’ve had 15 discrete development releases for both JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World products. We’ve brought seven new products to market and announced integrations that benefit JD Edwards customers. That’s a lot of work and investment from Oracle. And our customers are proving their support of our strategy by upgrading to the newest releases of our products. And we get our share of new customers, which validates that we are providing viable industry solutions to the marketplace."

These are the types of reasons why Jireh continues to invest in supporting JDE, helping JDE customers upgrade to the latest releases, and seeking out new customers for the JDE solution.

We encourage you to read the full article.

Oracle has recently conducted a case study comparing the cost of ownership for their JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution (JDE) against SAP in the same company.

Key findings:

• SAP cost almost twice as much as JDE to implement;
• SAP costs more than four times as much as JDE in administration per end-user;
• SAP requires more than four times as many IT support staff as does JDE;
• SAP has ongoing costs more than four times as much as JDE.

What is particularly interesting about this study - apart from the findings! - is that the comparison is between two similar divisions of the same company running similar business processes, so it is almost a direct comparison and therefore the findings are more compelling.

Oracle have given permission for us to share the case study, so please email me if you want a copy.

Gavin Knight, Director of Business Consulting