RISE K-Rise Systems Newsletter
Fall 2017
2018 project planning is underway, and it’s no different at K-Rise. We’ve got two important updates on EASYCommerce and our procurement solutions to share with you before the year ends. Plus JD Edwards events to put in the calendar now!
In This Issue The Past, Present, and Future of K-Rise l pg 2
2018 Calendar of JDE Events l pg 5
EASYCommerce Updates l pg 3
Employee Spotlight l pg 5
Spend Management Updates l pg 4 New to the K-Rise Family l pg 4
The Past, Present & Future of K-Rise Systems For our first 10 years, we focused on real-time integrated JDE Custom Development Projects with EASYProcess across the spectrum. In early 2015, K-Rise made JDE e-Commerce / Payments our #1 Practice. It’s worked great. In ’16 & ’17 we’ve added over 20 new EASYCommerce/EASYPay customers including big names like Christie’s, Treasury Wine Estates, and ServiceMaster. Some of the main reasons are because of our SOLR faceted item search and EASYProcess Platform.
Present K-Rise JDE “Buy” Strategic Solutions. K-Rise is making the same investment in our Buy-side solutions as we did Sell 2.5 years ago. Example, we’re integrating the SOLR faceted search with JDE Supplier Catalog items. More information on this page 4. Future Becoming ERP Agnostic. EASYProcess is SOA based and has over 400 Services built-in and is continually expanding. Currently, our Services include full SAP ECC (BAPI integration), EBS (stored procedures), and MS Dynamics AX support. Longer-term ,we’ll make our solutions more “standalone” with an enhanced EASYProcess SDK to position ourselves as ERP agnostic. As always, we detail our roadmap based on your requests. The next two pages go into more detail of what we have currently updated, and what we’re working on right now to get ready for 2018.
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Service Dollars Hard at Work EASYCommerce Updates Providing the best Customer and User EXperience (CX / UX) is key to providing intuitive functionality for finding items, overall navigation, and bottom line, making it so users desire to use a new sales channel. We’ve completed our CX suite with some new functionality, and expanded upon current features. Our new Hybrid B2B2C base GUI template is truly Tier-1 best practices like you’ll find on Grainger and more. We’ve added a new “My Account” menu and a compare widget. Plus, this new GUI template and our new UX Widget Editor now allows for easy GUI customizations. Here’s a recap of all 2017 EASYCommerce UX enhancements:
UX Widget Editor (New): We worked with our Web Design Partner to create our new hybrid B2B/C GUI template. Aesthetically, it’s a huge improvement and we will be adding additional base templates for increased choice. Additionally, we can now easily enable Client Custom GUI requirements from your Marketing team or Web Design Firm. Multi-Store (New): Enhanced multi-store functionality allows the creation of unlimited URLs (from one instance) for multi-store or multibranding, all from one admin. CMS – Content Management System (New): Our one-platform CMS approach allows business (e.g., Marketing) users to create new pages or edit existing pages with ease. A 7 minute YouTube CMS demo is here. Localization: Improved how EASYCommerce APIs work with Google Translate for multi-language. It’s 100% automatic at initial run-time. It also creates a data dictionary for easy translation overrides. SEO: We’ve enhanced SEO by automatically creating “Friendly Virtual URL” based on the item number & description. Admin “Feature Configurator” & “UI Configurator”: Hundreds of softcoded configuration settings allows Business to manage detailed elements of the UI, Logic, JDE Integration, Process Flow, etc. What’s powerful is all these configuration settings are set at the System level but can be overridden at the User Role, Account / Address Book, or User level. SOLR Product Catalog Improvements: We’ve improved managing and working with catalog properties for Company Top Items, Account Top Items, Product Promotions, and more.
New to the K-Rise Family SUPCO - A leading manufacturer and master distributor of high quality innovative products designed for the heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration and appliance parts industries. Cantex - A national manufacturer of nonmetallic electrical conduit, fittings, accessories, utility and communications duct, directional boring conduit and residential switch and outlet boxes.
Service Dollars Hard at Work Cont. Spend Management Updates As we mentioned on our roadmap, we put a lot of effort into our ECommerce & Payment portals for the last two years. Now we’re ready to put that same dedication towards our Spend Management products. We have many solutions on the “spend” side of business—Vendor Self-Service, Vendor Onboarding, PO Requisitioning, Supplier Contact & Item Update, and New Item Approval. Many prospects and customers found it confusing with all the different products as many want a combination of solutions. And we agree with you! That’s why we are forming them all under one umbrella solution called “EASYSpend.” We’re also updating the product so that it utilized the SOLR catalog, which is an important feature in our E-Commerce site, and adding it to our PO Requisitioning. This will make creating punch-out orders a breeze.
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BrassCraft - One of the world’s leading designers, manufacturers and distributors of plumbing products for the new construction and repair and remodel markets. ICOM America - ICOM is recognized as a reliable 2-way radio brand name around the world. ICOM America has more than 50 years of engineering and production excellence.
Contact Us
2018 Calendar of JDE Events
Give us a call or email for more information or to set up personalized demos.
April 22-26
K-Rise Systems 75 Executive Drive Suite 431 Aurora, IL 60504
Collaborate - Las Vegas, Nevada August 20-22 InFocus - Denver, CO
(630) 898-2923
October 28th-Nov 1st
info@krisesystems.com
Oracle Open World - San Francisco, CA
Visit us on the web at www.krisesystems.com
Registration is already open for Collaborate! We’ll be hosting a customer appreciation dinner Tuesday, April 24th and you’re all invited. There’s also plenty of local user group events to attend as well. If you’re a part of a great group, let us know so we can join you sometime!
Employee Spotlight Name: Jeremy Stowe Title: Senior Implementation Manager At K-Rise Since: September 2010 Why Programming? When my Dad brought home my family’s first computer when I was 11, I fell in love. From that point on I knew “what I wanted to do when I grew up.” Flash forward to college and having to choose between IT and IS was nigh impossible. I started as an IT major, but decided to focus on programming over networking which resulted in switching majors to IS the following year. I graduated from Purdue University in Spring of 2010, and started work as a Developer at K-Rise Systems just after Labor Day the same year. Through my time as a developer, I was lucky enough to work with many great clients and coworkers, and I developed an appreciation for the effort it takes to bridge the business and technical sides of a project. When a position became available to fill that role for K-Rise, I jumped at the opportunity. I’ve been an Implementation Manager at K-Rise for two years now, and every day has been challenging and rewarding. Interesting Facts: I graduated High School when I was 16, having skipped Kindergarten and 4th grade. My hobbies mostly revolve around games of some kind or the other. I am extremely excited and lucky to be getting married in January.