We reached out to one of our JD Edwards supply chain experts and asked what advice they give clients to prepare for the year ahead and maximize their time during the holiday season. They surprised us by giving us two specific notes for what clients should do during times where there may be a lull in project work due to holiday vacation time.
2 Ways to Prepare Your JD Edwards Supply Chain for the New Year
Whether you’re running World or EnterpriseOne, our consultant had two main items for your checklist: 1) Purge old data from your tables, and 2) Run a full audit of your data.
Purge Old Data from Your Tables
If you have downtime during or after the holiday rush, that’s the perfect opportunity for you to purge old data from your tables. To do so, you’ll need to purge the F41021 Inventory Location table. If you’re using Warehousing, you’ll purge the F4600 request table and the F4611 suggestion tables, and then repost all open suggestions after purging the data and rebuilding the F4602 (see below).
Why? Purging old data will help your system work more smoothly, as it’s not looking through 500 items to find the only two that are still relevant.
Run a Full Audit of Your Data
Any time you’re not actively using the system is also the time for you to run a full audit of your data. Begin by running audits based on what modules are being run. Next, clean up the F41021 data by properly removing any negative on-hand or committed quantities. If you’re using Warehousing, you’ll need to verify that the F41021 and F4602 tables are in line with each other. (This may require rebuilding the F4602.) Also, you may need to rebuild the random location and tiebreaker tables. If you’re using Transportation, make sure that all of the open shipments and loads have matching sales order lines. Our consultant said people are often surprised by how many orphaned shipments are found during this process.
Why? While you should be validating your system more than one time a year, days when offices or plants are closed due to holidays are the perfect time to get these processes out of the way. Not only will they help the health of your system, but holiday downtime means you wouldn’t have been able to get other work done anyway!
Pre-holiday Supply Chain Considerations
According to stats from Brafton, shoppers spend around 4% more during the holiday season than any other time of the year. Despite this increase in demand, nearly 40% of businesses are still unprepared to deliver on holiday shopping needs. Why? There are a couple of big supply chain issues that typically pop up near the end of the year. Here are two things to keep in mind to avoid potential holiday potholes and get a leg up on the competition.
Vacations (Not Just Your Own)
It probably seems pretty obvious, but you aren’t the only person going on vacation during the winter holiday season. Besides your coworkers and employees, vendors are also going to be out and about visiting friends and families (or maybe just spending some quality time in the Bahamas getting away from it all). No matter where their vacations take them, keep this fact in mind when thinking about our supply chain needs—your vendors might be closed for a few days, and key players might be unavailable for a little while.
As always, clear and open communication is your savior here. Get in touch with your key stakeholders, both internal and external, so that you can form a picture of holiday availability. Nobody wants to get an emergency phone call or email from work just when they’re sitting down to a nice family meal, so do your homework ahead of time and you can nip that situation in the bud.
Bad Weather = Shipping Nightmares
Obviously, inclement end-of-the-year weather varies in intensity based on where you’re located (Australians and South Americans, for example, are in the middle of their summer this time of year), but discounting the effect snow, ice, and heavy precipitation can have on your shipping operations is an invitation to Disaster Town, Population: You.
To tackle this problem head-on, use your information-gathering skills to know what to expect. Analyze your organization’s historical shipping information, as well as customer trends, to get a better sense of what you can predict this year in terms of demand, and the same holds true of historical weather data. While weather is an inherently chaotic system, knowledge of average conditions in the past can prove useful when making future decisions.
Now that you know how to optimize your JD Edwards supply chain for the holidays, you should be in much better shape than just flying blind. But if you want to not only survive the holidays but rather thrive, you’re going to need to call in the big guns: Surety Systems. Our wide network of senior-level JD Edwards SCM consultants will help you prepare for all the craziness of the holiday season and ensure your operations run smoothly and customers are happy.
