J.D. Edwards expert Peter McCarthy, who runs the Crossley96 consultancy, has delivered a favourable review of the Odyssey intelligent supply chain solution from Mid-Comp International.
He says: “Occasionally you come across something worth more than a second glance, and I believe the benefits of Odyssey should be shared with my industry colleagues.”
McCarthy says Odyssey is a legitimate contender for users unsure where JDE’s future may lie under the Oracle stewardship.
Mid-Comp CEO Steve Bridges, a former JDE colleague, sought McCarthy’s independent assessment of Odyssey, believed to be the world’s largest pure JAVA commercial business application.
McCarthy says Odyssey is visually very different, yet somehow comfortably familiar for the JDE literate.
The business rules Policies concept makes almost every function configurable – somewhat like JDE’s Dream Writer but more flexible.
While Dream Writer program switches rely on pre-defined options hard-coded within the base program, Odyssey Policies are chunks of variable object code which get merged in at run time. To add a new business rule, simply add another policy to the plug & play mix.
McCarthy’s assessment tasks were straightforward:
- Perform the full gambit of normal daily transactions as per JDE
- Try to break it
After 15 minutes of familiarisation with the basic screen disciplines and application process work flows, he launched a publicly available demo version called Odyssey to Go.
McCarthy says: “I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the standard JDE operations for a distribution environment have been well catered for, and Odyssey exceeded my expectations. There is lots of additional application functionality usually supplied as third party bolt-ons for JDE users.”
He found the Odyssey screens uncluttered, and coupled with a concept called Inheritance Processing, this makes Odyssey functions fairly intuitive.
The entire product follows the philosophy: “Keep it simple wherever possible, and provide optional complexity when needed via radio buttons.”
McCarthy’s overall assessment: “Anybody having had exposure to JDE will become familiar with Odyssey very easily indeed. The application suite is fairly comprehensive out of the box. The standard package is feature rich primarily because of the plug & play business rule Policies.
“I’d give Odyssey the thumbs up, as I believe there is little to gripe about from the conventional JDE customer operating in Supply Chain / Distribution.”