System and application management in Oracle JD Edwards with Tableau

Oracle JD Edwards is the most important software system in your organization. It is therefore a critical application that is vital to the continuity and performance of your business. This requires constant and proactive monitoring by the IT department to ensure that the system always runs smoothly within your company’s security policy. The business data you want to analyze are fixed in JD Edwards. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get the correct data from JD Edwards clearly displayed. Tableau is the tool for system and application management in JD Edwards.

In this blog, we look at the following main aspects of system and application management and how we deal with them using Tableau.

• Submitted Jobs
• Object Management
• User Events
• Security

Submitted Jobs

Typical questions about batch processes:

• How do batch processes perform during the day, night, weekend and month-end?
• How long do batches have to wait to actually run after submission?
• Which queues are bottlenecks?
• Which batch processes gradually take longer over time?
• How many records are processed per job?
• What are the toughest batch processes?
• Do I need to add more capacity to the servers?

Because the applications in JD Edwards cannot easily answer the questions above, batch monitoring is a challenging task. Nevertheless, the data for this is already in your database. Let’s see how we can use this data.

We use a Tableau Prep flow to make the data available in our Tableau Server.

We can then use it to create a dashboard in Tableau.

This is an example of a dashboard in Tableau that provides insight in the performance of the batch processes.

• On the left we can filter by queue, status, batches, users and time.
• Based on the filter, the top shows general metrics, which provide insight into the number of orders, waiting time, processing time and processed records.
• The graphs provide insight into the performance over time, per day of the month, per day of the week and per hour of the day.

The available building blocks come directly from the tables.

1. Dimensional attributes are available with clear names
2. We can derive all kinds of measured values from these attributes
3. We can create an analysis that filters using these attributes
4. We can create visualizations that show the measures per dimension

Tableau makes it easy for a business analyst to create a good report.

Object Management Workbench

Although JD Edwards is a very complete ERP system we often see that our customers need customization or extensions of the software. This change management is handled in the Object Management Workbench.

Typical questions regarding Object Management Workbench are:

• How many projects are there?
• How many objects are involved?
• What is the status of my projects?
• How many people are involved?
• What are lead times of:
  • Starting a change
  • Developing a change
  • Testing a change
  • Total between request and production

Although your database has the answers to these questions, it is a challenge to get them out of the standard application.

We use Tableau Prep to access the data from the database.

With this data we can create an Object Management Dashboard.

1. We use filters to restrict the data to specific projects, statuses, systems and users
2. The numbers provide direct insight into the totals
3. By selecting a specific project status, we get a view of the projects with that status
4. When you select a project, the objects in that project and the users involved are displayed
5. The details of the objects are displayed
6. Calculating the number of days that a project has been in a certain status or in a certain environment provides insight into the lead time.

The building blocks for the dashboards are also available for Object Management to make a meaningful analysis.

1. The dimensional attributes are shown
2. Measured values can be derived from this
3. This analysis can be visualized in an Object Management Dashboard

As you can see, Tableau allows you to combine data from JD Edwards into one clear Object Management Dashboard.

User events

Everything a user does in JD Edwards can be registered. With this data in the database, Tableau can answer questions such as:

• What are my users doing in my system?
• Who logs in most often?
• Who has been logged in the longest?
• At what times do users log in and out?
• Who changed that security setting?

Security

The JD Edwards Security Workbench is a very flexible and therefore extensive application. With the application you can control all kinds of security settings and permissions for users, groups, roles, applications, etc. With objects that the user defines himself, such as E1Pages, saved searches and much more, this becomes even more diverse. As a result, it is not always easy to determine who has access to what. Tableau can help you quickly understand this. Because of this, Tableau answers a number of important questions.

Who has access to which object?

Which role has access to which environment?

Which users are related to which roles?

Conclusion

With these examples, we hope to have inspired you to turn JD Edwards System and Application Management from a black box into a clear process, using Tableau’s powerful business intelligence. Let this be the beginning to help you create many more meaningful insights.