J.D. Edwards ,
the Denver, Colo.-based provider of collaborative software solutions, yesterday
announced it will use the Starbase Collaboration Suite, Starbase Corp.’s ,
collaborative product for developing and managing code and content, as the standard for
their global development organization.
The purchase of Starbase’s StarTeam Elite, CaliberRM and CaliberRM Professional
is intened to support J.D. Edwards’ distributed development organization of more than
1,100 people.
J.D. Edwards’ says the integrated Starbase solution will manage development
lifecycle of requirements, configuration, change management, testing and test
management for its supply chain management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and
customer relationship management (CRM) software.
“Starbase offered the flexibility and scalability we needed to support our growing
application development requirements,” says Michael Madden, group vice president and
chief technology officer.
“We believe that by implementing a set of software lifecycle tools and a
requirements-driven development process, we will equip our organization with the
engineering and management capabilities necessary to achieve increased speed and
improved software quality,” he explains.
Says James H. Smith, executive vice president, Starbase Customer Group: “The
Starbase Collaboration Suite provides extensive support for a requirement driven
development process that enables our customers to achieve savings. We look forward to
working with the team at J.D. Edwards as they deploy the Starbase solution
enterprisewide.”
In its second announcement, J.D. Edwards reported enhancements to its Enterprise
Asset Management (EAM) technology, designed to allow enterprises to maximize asset
productivity.
While the firm says it has been delivering maintenance management functionality
for the past ten years, this is the first time EAM is being offered as a stand-alone product.
The purpose of the technology is help asset-intensive businesses avoid unplanned
equipment shutdowns, and consequently financial loss, through synchronizing operations
requirements with maintenance.
“Current economic conditions are forcing businesses to focus on bottom-line results,”
states John Van Decker, Program Director at analyst firm META Group.
“Asset-intensive businesses that implement EAM solutions can facilitate the
scheduling of equipment downtime and the planning of maintenance outages in advance.
A solution effectively integrated into ERP processes can add value with an attractive
return on investment,” he explains.
“J.D. Edwards EAM provides customers with a maintenance system that helps asset
intensive enterprises in a wide range of industries better manage their assets and increase revenues,” says Lisa Fellows, vice president of cross industry product management at J.D. Edwards.
“EAM can drive more value from enterprises’ fixed investments. This is something
enterprises can directly control to improve their bottom line,” she adds.
“Tightly integrated with our ERP and other business processes in this environment,
our implementation of J.D. Edwards EAM technology for Plant and Equipment
Maintenance will be our standard solution for preventive maintenance, predictive
maintenance, work order management, and failure analysis,” says Craig Bickel, CIO of
Cabot Corp.
“We believe the benefits for improving our operational efficiencies are significant.
As we rationalize our stores inventories and part numbers, the integrated system will give
us a better ability to stage and appropriately distribute insurance parts and other forms of maintenance inventory to our manufacturing and distribution sites worldwide,” he
explains.
Significant enhancements to J.D. Edwards EAM include:
- Failure Analysis – Identifies the cause of failures and helps
prevent pending failures before an unplanned shutdown occurs; - Intelligent Graphics Solution (IGS) – J.D. Edwards’ solution also comes
pre-integrated with IGS, which provides visual representation of assets or property, and is deisgined to make the system easy for employees to use.
Other components included in the technology are:
- Fixed Asset Management – Improves the accessibility and flow of important asset information forthe entire asset life cycle;
- Plant and Equipment Maintenance – Helps minimize equipment downtime by giving users the power to incorporate planned and preventive maintenance strategies into their operations;
- Service and Warranty Management – Gives customers the power to integrate customer and product information, optimizing warranties, work order history, parts history and other key activities.
