Output Management

The challenge

When using JDE, you are confined to a standard way of working with your ERP application. That is exactly where Advanced-Forms® helps you to be flexible. Even if you are working in a standard way with your ERP application. Flexibility is very important. You don’t want to be dependent on a developer or consultant anymore. Be independent and be able to do it yourself. When sending your documents, you want to make sure that these documents can be sent to the recipients in a proper way. To be in control of your document is very important. When spending a lot of money and time on building your business, you want to make sure that all the documents that you are sending out are according to corporate standards.

Creating and re-creating the different document layouts often costs a lot of time and money. While designing you want to make sure the work can be done as efficiently as possible. Therefore you need a tool that you are able to design document layouts very easily and quickly in an efficient way. We want to make sure you can do all those things on your own. So you do not always have to rely on a partner or spend a lot of money on developing documents.

Also, the right service delivery is very important. You want to be able to send your documents via multiple channels. You want your customers to receive their documents in a way and a specific layout or format as they request it.

How it works

The benefits of Advanced-Forms® can be divided into four topics; 1. The powerful designer of Advanced-Forms®; 2. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get-) document workflow possibilities; 3. DIY (Do It Yourself-) principle; 4. A simply Flexible structure of the solution.

1. With the powerful designer of Advanced-Forms® creating or reformatting a document layout can be done quickly and easily.
2. Through the preview option, you can view the document with real-time data.
   Do you want to add a new field? And do you want to check whether it is in the right place? Or do you want to check if the font is the right one? Or even if the field is properly aligned? No problem, with the preview option in Advanced-Forms® you can immediately view the document as an end-result. Also, you have access to all kinds of different barcodes and fonts such as a MICR font, QR code, EAN-13, Code128, UPC, etc.
3. While creating and/or redesigning document layouts, often a lot of money is spent on developers because they build up documents throughout complex programming. Thanks to the simple structure of Advanced-Forms® and smart tools like the designer, you can easily create and/or reformat your document layouts by yourself. In this way, you are flexible, have short lead times, and save money.
4. The document workflow works as easily as ‘WYSIWYG’. You can build up each process in your own way. In the Advanced-Forms® studio, you can easily, by means of drag and drop, determine what should be done with a document after this is triggered from JDE. In the Advanced-Forms® studio, you can use an infinite number of engines that will act as an input, output, or other processing engines. It is also possible to obtain data from external databases with the connector of Advanced-Forms®. Furthermore, you can build validation processes in various workflows and have these approved via a mobile app, or in the Advanced-Forms® portal. Think for example of purposes such as ‘field services management’ or ‘approval of quotations’, etc.

JD Edwards integration

Advanced-Forms® has a specific JDE connector, which will transform the output known as a ‘JDE PDF’ into an XML format. With this data form (structure) every type of document can be created and distributed by multiple channels like mail, FTP, Service Bus, being printed, or even stored in an Advanced-Forms® Archive.

Besides the ‘JDE PDF’, we can also use the XML’s from JDE in the Advanced-Forms® process directly. It is also possible to expand your dataset by querying extra information from your JDE database or external databases. In the end, all the data you need can be obtained and be used for your outgoing documents.

Advanced-Forms® also has an integration with JDE, so that the actual outgoing documents can be stored as a JDE attachment. In this way, your outgoing documents can be stored back into JDE as an attachment to your record. Next to that, you can store your document in the print queue of JDE, so you will also see the outgoing document in your print queue.