Your enterprise is a busy place, constantly generating data from every corner of your operations. Thanks to process automation, the volume of ERP data that your business generates is even higher. The accuracy is higher too because process automation means fewer errors as opposed to manual systems, and the data is more real-time.

Enterprise automation is the natural evolution of process automation. Whereas process automation is focused on solving a particular problem or improving a particular process, enterprise automation takes a more holistic view of the enterprise, its interconnected and interdependent processes, and the vast amount of data it generates. It allows you to tackle siloed data and use it to build an enterprise-wide view of your business. It allows you to ingest transactional data from your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne system, use that data to draw models of your business processes and expose metrics and measurements about how those processes are running. The building blocks of enterprise automation are models and metrics, and especially the business data from which they are derived. In short, enterprise automation helps you glean more definitive value from your EnterpriseOne system beyond the simple recording and reporting of transactions.

Where do we begin? The good news is that while the concept of enterprise automation might be relatively new, we are not starting from scratch. We already have many assets, especially years or decades of business data, that we can use to help us build those models and metrics. For that, we owe a debt of gratitude to our automated processes and the data they generate. Each of these processes, in addition to accomplishing their transactions more efficiently, also gives us the opportunity to collect metrics about those processes. So what kind of metrics can our EnterpriseOne processes generate with enterprise automation? Automated processes bring in transactional data (like total sales figures, product discounts, etc.) as well as data metrics that are derived, aggregated, or calculated from the transactional data (like the number of sales orders created in a quarter, average time to approval, or the number of times a process failed within a period). These quantifiable data metrics might just hold some surprises, and we can analyze them to better streamline our processes.

The metrics, in their summarized and aggregated form, give us insight into how the enterprise is running—insights that can help business leaders and line of business executives reduce the number of days it takes to ship a product out the door, reduce the time taken to raise invoices or optimize any business area where we face a challenge.

Human-built process models are often like stained-glass windows: pretty to look at, but no matter how thoughtfully curated, they still fail to offer the clear visibility that your business needs. Enterprise automation, on the other hand, can generate actionable models and metrics based on your raw data. And because of that, the first step in enterprise automation is ensuring that the data that your system ingests is complete. Here’s an example: you have 100 purchase orders raised in the system, but 120 invoices from vendors. This data indicates that 20 orders were delivered without a purchase order; it reflects a lack of process standardization across the enterprise. For enterprise automation to create metadata that’s valuable for your business, you’ll need higher accuracy with your raw, transactional data.

EnterpriseOne automation tools are already helping you overcome this challenge with better visibility and by helping you see how activities in each of your processes evolve from beginning to end. Orchestrator and Workflows allow you to automate business processes. These process automation tools within EnterpriseOne are making your ERP data more reliable, more accurate, and timelier. Similarly, EnterpriseOne pages give you a canvas on which you can use tiles and connecting arrows to visualize your processes, and Watchlists allow you to visualize metrics within the context of those process models.

With enterprise automation, the goal is to next put your ERP data to work, allowing you to build efficient business models and metrics. These are the two big pieces in enterprise automation: the models represent the steps in a process and the metrics are superimposed on them to identify if the models are healthy.

Whatever your goals—fixing a customer satisfaction issue or getting your products delivered on time—it’s impossible to achieve them just by looking into individual transactions. But you can identify both new opportunities as well as blind spots with wider enterprise automation and the models and metrics that it generates. The result is immeasurably higher value from your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system that you've invested in and the business data—the digital gold—that you have amassed.

If you are interested in learning more about new Enterprise Automation features included in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Release 23 and Release 24, here are a few from the JD Edwards Product Catalog (Oracle account sign-in required):

Release 23:

• Link Between EnterpriseOne Pages
• Watchlist Badges on EnterpriseOne Page Tiles
• Calling an Orchestration from a Workflow

Release 24:

• Enterprise Automation for Procurement
• Enterprise Automation for Logistics
• Workflow Monitor
• Task Tracking
• Notification Reminders

Additional enterprise automation features are planned as part of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne roadmap.