ARCAD Keeps Customized JDE World Environments on the Straight and Narrow

June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

JD Edwards World shops that make a lot of customizations and modifications to their ERP environments may be interested in knowing that ARCAD Software just announced that its application lifecycle management (ALM) tool is fully compatible with World A9.3, the latest release from Oracle.

ERP modifications are a two-edged sword. While they can give your organizations an edge on the one hand, they can also complicate future maintenance work and upgrades on the other. For this reason, most modern-day ERP vendors strongly discourage their customers from modifying the code.

But modifications have been a tradition for JD Edwards World customers. In fact, you could argue that the ERP system actually encourages the practice (and makes it less risky) by enabling features such as “soft-coding” of files, which allow developers to control everything from the description of a field to how that field will be used, and the JDE World Software Version Repository (SVR).

Nevertheless, there’s always a risk involved when modifying code or promoting those changes into production, which is what keeps the ALM software vendors in business. One of those ALM vendors, ARCAD Software, this month unveiled a new JDE interface for JD Edwards World.

ARCAD says World shops can continue to manage their files as they have been using the JDE tools (including SVR), and have those changes imported into the ARCAD repository, using ARCAD’s Datachanger technology. This allows World shops to utilize ARCAD ALM features, such as “one-step check out” and promotion of record-level changes from development, through test, and into production.

The JDE interface ensures that all changes to World, including those made to soft-coded functions, are tracked and auditable. It even supports the distribution of JDE-specific record types, ARCAD says. Using ARCAD’s promotion features does not prevent developers from using specific JDE create commands and pre-processing options, ARCAD adds.

The way the ARCAD suite interfaces with SVR, the backbone of the JDE World development environment, is another characteristic of its support for JDE World. ARCAD says its JDE World interface uses information from the SVR and allows developers to work with SVR tools, including editing and compiling of programs.

“Support for JDE has been a strategic priority for ARCAD Software given the sheer scale of its installed base on IBM i and in particular the extensive local customizations made,” ARCAD CEO Philippe Magne says in a press release. “Our design goal has always been to minimize the learning curve for the JDE programmer, as we are adding to his toolset rather than replacing it.”

The new JDE interface is included in version 9.2 of ARCAD’s suite, which was just released. This release is fully compatible with JDE World version A9.3, which Oracle shipped in 2012.