Functional Support Under Pressure: Why Outsourcing Is the Way to Go

Author: Serge Desloover Senior Account Manager @Quistor

Many companies have to deal with the unprecedented impacts of COVID-19, resulting in an even more increased focus to keep their core business running.

One of the main focus points of most companies - and probably yours as well - is the functional support of your JD Edwards ERP system. This system is your business’ critical administration backbone. The functional reliability of your system is key, but it takes time, effort, and costs to maintain it effectively. Some businesses have people who try to maintain it next to their daily job. Others have a small functional team of people trying to accommodate the ‘daily operation’ as effectively as possible. Those great employees often tend to drown in their work, don’t have the time and/or skills to keep their knowledge up-to-date with the latest and greatest functionalities, or even worse, they find a job elsewhere. Goodbye knowledge and good luck HR trying to find a new resource.

Outsourcing functional support

For decades Quistor and its employees have been providing excellent functional support to our customers located all over the world. We don't only resolve first and/or second-line tickets, but we are also more and more involved in activities like master data management, period closing support, functional training, integrity checks, pro-active support on localizations, IFRS16, and much more.

We see a growing trend in companies outsourcing (part of) their functional support. Especially this year since COVID has affected a lot of their business. During the last months, Quistor received multiple new requests from potential customers asking us to take over their functional support, mostly related to the above-mentioned reasons.

Functional Support Calculation Tool

To accommodate these requests we have started to invest more in our current (nearshore) functional support centers. To support you in making a well-informed decision, Quistor created the Functional Support Calculation Tool. With this tool, you can calculate your support needs based on a selection of over 250 (!) different support services.

The use of this calculation tool has various benefits for your company. With the outcome you will be able to:

  • Review the real need for support in minutes/hours per period. Ideal for periodical budget calculation (a good business case driver).
  • See the spread of the support needed per area/module/service and check if your current organization is able to coop with this workload.
  • Be able to calculate your support needs for the (near) future. Again a good business case driver!
  • Decide which services you might outsource and which services you want to keep within your company.

To help you in getting this great insight, Quistor offers you this Functional Support Calculation Tool free of use!

Functional Support Areas

To give you an idea of what types of support we offer to our customers, here are some examples:

  • First and second-line ticket-based functional support ○ Resolve errors in sales update, blocked orders, amount mismatches, etc.
  • Setup & maintenance support ○ Setup payment terms, translations, next number setup, etc.
  • Master data management support ○ Add new items/suppliers/customers, adjust UDC’s, (DM)AAI’s, etc.
  • Localization support ○ Pro-actively support you on localization changes per country
  • Integrity control and reporting ○ AP/GL, AR/GL, FA/GL, unposted transactions, etc.
  • Training ○ Standard JDE module training, template-specific training
  • BI publisher document support ○ Output document changes, translations, data-driven printing, etc
  • Go live and hypercare support ○ Support (end)users during go-live and hypercare, issue solving, etc.
  • Support on Orchestrations & E1 add-on products ○ BMC, Qsoftware, DAS ReportsNow, DWS SwiftTest, ES - Single Sign On, Essentio Archivist, Mendix, Rinami Cantara,

DSI, SlimStock, etc.

Have we made you curious and are you looking for this particular insight? Do you want to know, based on facts, if this is something your organization can really benefit from, completely free of charge? If the answer to one of these questions is 'yes', then please don't hesitate to contact us.

Before you go

Feel free to ask us any question, ask for more information or simply say hello in this contact form.

Get in touch