1. Interactive attachment selection provides planners/schedulers a dynamic interface where they can pick and choose which attachments print, and sometimes more importantly do not print. This gives users the option to associate as many attachments as necessary on a work order but the flexibility and control to determine what is printed at a given time, cutting back on wasted time and resources. Check it out below:

2. Multiple connections to external file repositories enable an added level of flexibility for those users that want to store attachments in external content management systems such as SharePoint, Meridian, or others. This release allows you to define multiple hosts and authentication credentials so that the product can access those attachments stored on your network versus those stored within JD Edwards proper.

3. Round robin scheduling allows ad hoc print submissions to print ahead of large batch jobs, ensuring that emergency, corrective, or other ad hoc work order packages are printed and passed to maintenance crews as quickly as possible. By logically giving equal priority to all print jobs, the system saves users time and potential confusion.

4. Print preview of batch jobs in the job status queue improves print preview functionality. Now users can view entire batch jobs of printed work orders and attachments in the job status queue. Whether Print Immediate is set to “Yes” or “No”, users have the flexibility to print how they want. What users will get now is a single PDF that is collated as the following:

Work has already started on the next release to add even more features that we are hearing about in the marketplace. Stay tuned for more details.

Unfortunately, suppliers on the other end of these terms, who tend to be smaller businesses, are experiencing significant cash flow problems as they are effectively lending money to their bigger customers, interest free. Here’s how the article puts it:

“The moves are creating ripple effects. Companies that hold on to cash longer create deficits at suppliers that have to find financing, raise prices or squeeze other firms along the supply chain. Smaller companies with little bargaining power and less access to credit ultimately could see their costs rise, pinching funds that could otherwise be spent on hiring or investments.”

Our own company, STR Software, is impacted by this trend in two ways. Firstly, as a developer of enterprise software, servicing many of the largest companies in the world, we are also getting pinched by these longer payment terms. Interestingly, the second way this shift is impacting our customers is through those who are using our software to improve accuracy and speed up delivery of accounts receivable (AR) invoices to their own customers.

During a recent visit to a customer, a manufacturer/supplier of scientific equipment, the Operations Manager excitedly shared that AventX’s ability to send invoices from any Oracle form has enabled the AR team to easily send invoices on-the-fly, rather than waiting for that evening’s batch of email and fax deliveries to be processed. Frankly, the excitement around saving a few hours blew our minds a little bit. It shouldn’t – we market and sell the technology – but we’re talking about the difference of one business day?! If we start to do the math, however, it’s easy to see how one day can have a significant impact on a business with tens or hundreds of invoices going out daily. Given the longer and longer payment terms, every day counts all the more.

It’s unlikely large companies will reverse course from this trend in the near future, if ever. However, with better AR practices and the ability to get invoices out as quickly as possible, we hope our customers are able to keep pinching back.

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STR Software develops and delivers integrated solutions for delivery of critical business documents. Click here to learn more about delivering AR Invoices from Oracle EBS.

The AventX Oracle Connector comes out of the box with “embedded queries” for sending six of the most popular document types including purchase orders, invoices, statements, work orders, sales order acknowledgements, and requests for quotations (we call these “seeded documents” because AventX provides the SQL query for finding recipient’s email address, fax number, or their defined printer). This means without any advanced configuration the software can fax, email, print, and archive these documents.  For those of you that have custom reports like dunning letters, quote acknowledgments, packing slips, pick slips, etc., we have an easy to use tool in Oracle EBS called the “New Document Wizard” (aka the Add Your Own Document Wizard or AYOD  for short).  This tool can help you do some pretty cool stuff without any custom code including the following:

• Configure any document for email, fax, or print delivery as a batch or a single document
• Configure an unlimited number of recipients; simply enter your SQL and we even provide a “Test Query” button to make sure it returns the correct recipient data.  The query can be configured to return the first recipient or all recipients.
• Configure the subject of email that AventX will send on a per document type basis.
• Configure who receives acknowledgments regarding delivery status (e.g. success and failure).
• Configure a specific attachment extraction query.
• Configure an XML Archive Gateway query (this tells AventX how it should archive your new document).
• Configure a sender query (i.e. the FROM = value); this is who gets the email if the recipient hits the “reply” button.

To help you get started, here are the slides from our Add Your Own Document tutorial webcast:

If you need some additional help, I offer the following resources:

1. Contact me directly to learn more:  john.vincent@strsoftware.com
2. Customers on active support can call STR Software’s Support Team with questions and requests for help regarding how to configure additional documents for automated delivery.
3. Log into our Support Portal to read the knowledge base article and gain access to demonstration videos:  How to setup additional documents with the AventX Add Document Wizard with your SQL

• We developed and released a brand new product for printing work orders with attachments from JDE E1 CAM. This is our first offering tailored to the JDE ERP and it has been great getting to know this market.
• Customer-driven development resulted in launching some awesome new features in our flagship products. On the email and fax side, “Stand Alone Document Delivery” makes delivery from Oracle even more intuitive to the end user. For our print product on the asset management side, the ability to dynamically select which work orders and attachments are printed has completely changed how users interact with their documents.
• We brought on five new hires from some of Virginia’s finest universities. They are bringing enthusiasm and innovation to our Services, Development, and Marketing teams.
• STR President, Ben Bruno, and Manager of Product Development, Brent Lowe, traveled to Australia for three weeks to meet with customers and perform implementations. Both were impressed with the vast and beautiful country and learned a ton about the mining industry.
• Our services team continues to receive high marks for their prompt, courteous, and reliable customer interactions, earning ratings of ‘Satisfied’ or ‘Highly Satisfied’ from 99% of hundreds of customer surveys sent out following the resolution of support tickets.
• We launched a new category on the blog aimed at helping customers get the most value from their investments in AventX software.
• 2012 kicked off the inaugural Foosball season at “STR Stadium”. The competition has been fierce but sportsmanship and camaraderie rule the table.
• We continue to thrive personally at STR Software as well: in 2012 we celebrated one wedding, one new baby, two new houses, and the milestone of sending a child to college.

Looking forward, 2013 will be a year of discovery and growth as we travel to visit more customer sites, bring on more new hires with diverse experience, and deploy new communications tools like LinkedIn Groups. More importantly, we’ll take the data we uncover and apply customer-driven development to both new and existing products. We are excited about what is to come and the relationships that will continue to grow in the coming months.

8 key considerations when evaluating a work order package printing solution:

Do you need a solution that:

• Allows users to print work order packages without leaving JDE
• Automates printing, one-off or batch, of complete work order packages.
• Has the ability to dynamically select which attachments print with the work orders
• Prints database attachments and/or attachments from elsewhere on the network, such as files in a repository like SharePoint.
• Enables organizations to utilize existing work order reports rather than creating new, vendor-specific work order reports.
• Manages requests and prints work order packages without affecting your overall system performance.
• Is compatible with printer finishing options, such as stapling.
• Can print a wide variety of attachment types including: MS Office, PDF, PCL, TIFF, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG and more

Click here to view a demo video AventX Print Xpress – the most robust work order package printing solution available to the JDE market.

If you are ready to dramatically reduce the time it takes to print complete work order packages from JDE E1 CAM,  please contact us today!

KGHM International Ltd., formerly Quadra FNX Mining, is a wholly owned subsidiary of KGHM Polska Miedz S.A., a major global copper producer. Focused on growth in copper and other metals, KGHM operates mines in the United States, is currently constructing the Sierra Gorda copper-molybdenum project in Chile, and is actively progressing the Victoria project in Sudbury, Ontario Canada.

The Problem:

KGHM uses JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Capital Asset Management (JDE E1 CAM) module for maintenance planning and scheduling. From this module, planners and schedulers print work orders to provide to maintenance teams making repairs and doing preventative work.

During the company’s Sudbury plant implementation of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 in June 2012, challenges arose with some of the ERP’s native functionality. Following best practice, Sudbury had associated documents with each of their preventative maintenance work orders – text files, images, diagrams, and other attachments that provide detailed instruction. Despite the smooth implementation, the planners and schedulers had a significant business requirement left unresolved: automatically printing work orders and their associated attachments in one collated package. JDE E1 CAM prints work orders and first text attachments, but the other attachments have to be opened separately in their native viewers (e.g. Microsoft Word, Adobe Reader, etc.) then printed and collated manually. This lengthy and cumbersome process was a detriment to efficiency, something KGHM constantly works to improve as a key part of their overall asset reliability strategy. KGHM also had a business requirement to print the first text attachment associated with a work order which JDE E1 CAM can do, but it cannot preserve any of the attachment’s formatting.

The Solution

When Darcy Bains, Manager of Enterprise Applications at KGHM, met STR Software at an Oracle event in May 2012, he was excited to hear about their initiative to automate work order package printing for JDE E1 CAM. Though the product, AventX Print Xpress, was still in development, KGHM agreed to beta test the software. This arrangement would allow KGHM to determine would fulfill their needs, and would help STR Software fine-tune the product after seeing it work in a real-world, dynamic JDE E1 CAM environment.

With AventX Print Xpress, users were able to print all attachments, regardless of file format, and preserve all formatting – all without ever leaving JDE E1 CAM. They were also able to print attachments from anywhere within their corporate environment: JDE database, network servers, SharePoint, or from a URL. No training was required since the process for the end user was exactly the same as it always had been.

After just one month of using the solution in production, Teri Vial, Maintenance Business Analyst at KGHM states, “Printing with AventX is saving each planner the equivalent of 7 weeks per year and we have six planners at the Sudbury plant. That equals forty-two weeks per year; almost the same as saving a full salary for another person!”

With success at Sudbury, KGHM is in the process of implementing AventX Print Xpress at each of their three other plants.

STR Software specializes in document delivery solutions for email, fax, internet fax, and print. The AventX Product Suite integrates with internally-developed and host ERP applications including Oracle EBS, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, IFAS, EAS, and more in UNIX, Linux, MPE, and Windows environments.

In addition to exhibiting, we will be presenting a session in the Maintenance track: “Print Work Orders with Media Object Attachments Directly from JDE E1 CAM”. Our session will feature a case study from KGHM International, a JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customer who implemented STR Software’s AventX Print Xpress to solve its manual work order package printing problem.

STR’s presenters will include Jackson Macomber, Marketing Manager, and Brent Lowe, Manager of Product Development. KGHM’s Manager of Enterprise Applications Darcy Bains will be there as well to assist with the live demonstration.

If you’re not familiar with this event, the summit will cover how Oracle is helping companies transform supply chains into value chains to gain competitive edge, and will focus on key industry issues and feature hands-on workshops and solution demonstrations. With six solution areas, 18 tracks, and almost 200 sessions, the Value Chain Summit is not to be missed.

This new feature, shown below in Figure 1, provides a new button that gives speedy access to viewing the AventX log flies directly within Oracle EBS instead of accessing the UNIX file system.

For those with access to the AventX UNIX file system, this will save you at least five to ten minutes.  But if you don’t have access, this is where the “View Log” button becomes really helpful.

Figure 1: New AventX Delivery Status Form – View Log Button

While we had the hood up (yes I like cars), we even added a configurable option that supports saving log files up to 1,024 MB.  Don’t worry about that number.  The file size is checked daily and oldest log files are automatically removed from the file system.

I would love to hear your feedback on how this new feature could help your organization.  Post your comments or send an email to john.vincent@strsoftware.com and let me know what you think.

STR Software strives to keep its products relevant for customers through upgrades and new releases, which provide additional functionality to customers while enabling them to receive better support and assistance down the road. Upgrading benefits both the customer and the software company.

The benefit to the customer is access to all of the cool features and fixes.  Production environments are more stable and user productivity should improve if the new features have value.  In our case, more than 90% of the features we develop are a result of our customer-driven product development strategy.  That is how we created features such as the “AventX Magic Button” and the “Secure and Confirmed Email”.

The benefit to software companies is they don’t have to train support engineers to learn very old versions.  This helps lower costs and frees up development and testing resources to focus on creating features that companies want.

Discontinuing support on product versions is also not limited to just software companies.  I am a car guy, so I think of things in terms of what I know best.  Ford Motor Company declared the popular 5.0 liter V8 as “End-of-Life” in 1995 when they came out with the 1996 version of the Mustang GT.  Ironically, the 5.0 is back and you can even buy the motor direct fromFord Racing – 5.0L V8.

STR Software recognizes that companies can’t upgrade their software on the day it is released.  Companies have policies and project plans in place that prohibit them from upgrading to later versions.  On the flip side, it is almost impossible for a software company to continue to support all software versions.  So, where is the balance between the two?

After listening to our customers we decided to change our approach to discontinuing support on product versions.  The following represents the various phases a software version will travel through its life cycle.

Over time, product versions will now enter into each of these phases; “Premium Support”, “Standard Support”, and “End of Life Support”.  Prior to this change, STR Software did not offer the “Standard Support” phase for older software versions.  Product versions would simply go into the “End of Life” phase, which provides limited support services.  The introduction of “Standard” support brings additional options and flexibility.  More detail on what services are available within these phases is available by clicking on the graphic and logging into the STR Software Customer Portal.

Now you can predict when versions fall into the various phases.  All of the timelines are posted in the STR Software Support Portal for each product you purchased.  You can click the following graphic to access the timelines.  Knowing these dates will allow you to plan for upgrades more effectively.

In addition, customers who can’t upgrade before a version falls into the “Standard” phase can continue to receive access to technical support help over the phone and/or email and not pay any additional fees to continue to run the older versions.

I would love to hear your feedback on this change.  Post your comments or send an email to john.vincent@strsoftware.com and let me know what you think.

Many of you are likely charged with the task of investigating how to move AventX to EBS R12.1.3 and some of your questions are probably part of the FAQs listed below.  I encourage you to check out the slides below to learn more about what other customers are asking about when migrating to EB R12.1.3 with AventX. If you have a question, post it to the blog or send an email to john.vincent@strsoftware.com and let me know how I can help.

1. Will my version of AventX work with R12.1.3?
2. Will my queries work in R12.1.3 also?
3. What new features are available in AventX when I upgrade?
4. How will STR Software help?
5. What AventX architecture options are supported?
6. How long does it take?
7. How do I get the license keys for testing in R12.1.3?
8. Are there any red flags to avoid?
9. What should I do next?