Oracle Dives into Health and Safety at JDE Summit

February 5, 2013 Alex Woodie

The JD Edwards partner ecosystem convened last week in Broomfield, Colorado, for the fourth annual JD Edwards Summit. Oracle used the gathering to launch new software for EnterpriseOne, including a new Health and Safety Incident Management module for tracking incidents, and a related reporting tool for complying with government mandates. Big Red also announced that One View, the EnterpriseOne reporting tool launched last year, will be available to customers running version 9.0, in addition to the current 9.1 release.

The new Health and Safety Incident Management application is a component of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne version 9.1, which Oracle announced last year. The software automates much of the workflow involved with tracking and analyzing health and safety incidents, including injuries to humans as well as the building, equipment, or machinery involved in the accident.

Lyle Ekdahl, group vice president general manager for Oracle’s JD Edwards unit, expects the new software to be adopted by EnterpriseOne shops in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, timber, mining, oil and gas, engineering and construction. “All of them are very safety focused,” he says. “In fact many of these customers, when we meet them, they start out the meeting with a safety minute, where they talk about safety issues.”

When you’re given the potential to decrease the rate of accidents and help the plight of human suffering–while simultaneously complying with government mandates and turning a profit at the same time–you take it.

“The reality is, on a worldwide basis, 250 million occupational accidents happen every year,” Ekdahl continues. “If they can save the eyesight of somebody, or save lives by being able to trend on accidents in a particular plant or a particular machine, that’s something they obviously want to do. It not only helps them with their safety reporting with those agencies, but also can ultimately save lives.”

Oracle also announced One View Reporting for Health and Safety Incident Management, a version of the new One View reporting tool designed to help customers generate the reports necessary for complying with OSHA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and international agencies.

One View is based on Oracle’s BI Publisher 11g software that generates day-to-day operational reports (not strategic analytics) for EnterpriseOne. When Oracle launched One View at last April’s Collaborate conference, it included 178 pre-built reports to run against customers’ production EnterpriseOne databases, including DB2 for i, Oracle 11g, and SQL Server databases.

With last week’s launch of One View Reporting for Health and Safety Incident Management, Oracle now offers six One View packages. Other packages target other business processes, including transportation management, capital asset management, financials, human resources, and inventory.

Oracle also announced that EnterpriseOne version 9.0 customers can now use One View. “We’ve had such a huge demand for [One View], especially from our customers who are on the 9.0 applications, that we have back-ported that functionality to 9.0,” Ekdahl says. “So now, 9.0 customers have access to hundreds of reports and thousands of report components. That’s going to be highly exciting for the 9.0 customer base.”

Approximately 670 people from about 140 JD Edwards business partners around the world gathered for Oracle’s JDE Summit 2013 last week. There were more than 250 sessions, making it the largest summit in the four-year history of the event.