Hidden Cost of Working Around JD Edwards
How small workarounds quietly become long term operational friction
Hey I am a developer at heart.
Those of you that have met me and talked with me at conferences know this because I love when a discussion gets technical and we get to look back at the good old days and how we solved some big need or complex issue with style.
We all have those stories.
The clever batch job.
The custom table that saved the day.
The report that turned into the backbone of a department.
And at the time those things were absolutely the right answer.
But the JD Edwards ecosystem has changed.
We now have tools like Orchestrations, Logic Extensions, CafeOne, and other UDO capabilities that allow us to solve problems in far more flexible ways than we could fifteen years ago.
The problem is not that those older solutions existed. The problem is that many organizations never stopped to revisit them.
And over time something subtle starts to happen.
Small workarounds begin to turn into operational habits.
The Quiet Cost of Workarounds
When people talk about technical debt in JD Edwards they usually think about things like:
Longer upgrade timelines
Heavy customization
Complex retrofits
Those are real costs.
But there is another cost that is much harder to see.
Operational friction.
I once saw a process where a user downloaded a spreadsheet from a custom JD Edwards program every week.
They would spend the better part of a day updating values in the spreadsheet.
Then they would upload it into a portal that pushed updates back into a single field in a table.
Eight hours of manual effort every week.
Everyone involved was smart. Good people. Dedicated employees.
But the process had been around so long that nobody questioned it anymore.
Once a quarter IT would spend half a day debugging an issue caused by manual data changes in that spreadsheet.
This is the quiet cost of working around your ERP.
How Workarounds Become Culture
Most workarounds start with good intentions.
Someone solves a real problem quickly.
The business moves forward.
People appreciate the solution.
Then it becomes familiar.
Then it becomes expected.
Eventually it becomes invisible.
What started as a temporary workaround quietly becomes the operating model.
This is one of the reasons I talked about culture so much in my previous article about automation versus transformation.
(Link to: Automation Is Not Transformation)
Because the real challenge is not technical.
It is behavioral.
People get comfortable with what they know.
They build routines around spreadsheets, manual downloads, small custom tools, and side processes that live outside JD Edwards.
Over time the ERP becomes the system of record, but not the system of work.
And that is where friction starts.
One of the challenges with operational friction is that the people closest to the process often stop seeing it. When something has been done the same way for years, it simply feels normal. This is actually one of the reasons companies often bring us into a JD Edwards environment in the first place.
An outside set of eyes looking at how the system is really being used can quickly spot the friction points, workarounds, and small inefficiencies that the organization has slowly learned to live with.
The Go Vanilla Conversation
This is also where the Go Vanilla movement in JD Edwards starts to matter.
Going vanilla is not about saying custom development was wrong.
A lot of those customizations solved real business needs.
But as the platform evolves, organizations have an opportunity to revisit those solutions and ask a better question.
Is this still the best way to solve this problem today?
Many times the answer is no.
And when you replace an old workaround with a modern capability inside JD Edwards, something interesting happens.
The process simplifies.
The ownership becomes clearer.
And the business starts trusting the system again.
The Leadership Side of This
One thing I have learned over time is that these conversations are rarely about technology.
They are about people.
That employee who spends eight hours a week updating that spreadsheet is not lazy.
They are committed.
They believe they are doing something valuable for the business.
And leaders have a responsibility to help people understand that their value is not tied to maintaining inefficient processes.
Their value is in solving new problems.
Improving operations.
Helping the business move forward.
Sometimes the best thing leadership can do is remove the busy work that people have grown comfortable with.
Moving the Needle
JD Edwards is incredibly capable.
But like any ERP system it reflects the behavior of the organization using it.
If we keep building workarounds, the system will reflect that.
If we modernize processes and challenge old habits, the system reflects that too.
This is why modernization conversations are not just about upgrades or tools.
They are about periodically stepping back and asking a simple question.
Are we still solving this problem the right way?
Sometimes the answer is yes.
But sometimes the answer is that the clever solution we built fifteen years ago has quietly become the friction slowing us down today.
And recognizing that is the first step toward fixing it.
– Justen Geiger
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