Hot on the heels of Oracle OpenWorld 2009, the 9.1 PeopleSoft app releases keep coming.

Over the weekend, Oracle has made available both PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Solutions 9.1 and Customer Relationship Management 9.1.  Both of these releases are now available on eDelivery and you can find the release notes on Oracle’s ‘My Oracle Support’ by looking up ‘PeopleSoft 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50 Documentation Home Page Links’  which contains links to information related to all PeopleSoft 9.1 product lines.

If you have any questions about these releases, please email me.  I’m happy to help.

Related Posts

Oracle Announces General Availability of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1

PeopleSoft HRMS 9.1: An Exploration (Part 1)

PeopleTools 8.5 Now Available

Quick Look: PeopleSoft ALM 9.1 Enhancements

PeopleSoft Financials: Source-to-Settle 9.1 Enhancements

Oracle’s Curtiss Barnes on the new Continuous Delivery Model for Campus Solutions:

First and foremost, this is an inflection point for us and represents the first (highly visible) move to the next generation of PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions (CS). Several years ago, when Oracle announced Applications Unlimited, we indicated that we would continue the development of CS with a vision of the very long run. Since then we have released the very substantial set of enhancements that comprise CS9.0. Many of our customers have upgraded to that release and are taking advantage of the Enrollment Back Pack and improvements in the internet-native Student Self-Service module, as well as features like Population Select/Update, which have enhanced productivity across all administrative offices.

Second, we’ve had ongoing discussions with our customers about finding ways to both reduce the scope of upgrades – especially those in the combined PeopleSoft CS-HR instance – and accelerate the time to market of new features. Upgrades – ours and those of our competitors – have their own history, and I think we all appreciate the idea that the old model existed because big release cycles were necessary to accommodate scope as ERP products evolved architecturally and matured in terms of functionality.

This is an interesting development in the support structure of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions that should be talked about.  From MIPRO’s standpoint, I think this is a great move from Oracle that will highly benefit customers, especially since they will be able to take advantage of new functionality without having to do a complete system upgrade.  Any campus solution customers that are not aware of how this is going to work will benefit from reading Barnes’s post in its entirety.

###

Previously by David Brunet:

A New Settlement Method for PeopleSoft Payables
PeopleTools 8.5 Now Available
What Drives Clients to PeopleSoft Real Estate Management (REM)
Quantifying the Value of Integration With PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Real Life Example
Quick Look: PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) 9.1 Enhancements
PeopleSoft ‘Edge of the Enterprise’ Applications: eSupplier Connection & eSettlements
PeopleSoft Financials: Source-to-Settle 9.1 Enhancements
PeopleSoft IT Asset Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Real Estate Management: A Deeper Look
An Introduction to PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management
Sneak Peek: PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1
PeopleTools 8.5: A Look Inside

Related whitepapers (PDF):

PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits

Related web content:

MiPro Consulting: PeopleSoft Services
MiPro Consulting: Resources

I know it’s a holiday week, but I’d like to take a little time to talk about PeopleSoft’s secret weapon when it comes to Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). That weapon? Integration.

Look at the past to predict the future.

When ERP systems first became available in the early 1990s, the functionality offered typically consisted of:

• A Financial system (GL, AR, AP and Fixed Assets)
• A Distribution/Order Management system (Sales Order Management, Inventory, Purchasing, Basic Warehouse Management)
• A Manufacturing system (MRP, Capacity Requirements Planning, Work Orders)

This created a market opportunity for the Best of Breed vendors, and many of them flourished. Companies such as I2, Manugistics and Numetrix grew rapidly by exploiting functional gaps in the Supply Chain Planning capabilities offered by the ERP vendors.  Siebel, Vantive and many others did the same thing in the CRM market.

When it came to Asset Management, the ERP vendors provided only basic Fixed Asset capabilities and tended to view assets as something to simply be managed on a balance sheet.  Naturally, this created yet another opportunity for Best of Breed EAM and Maintenance Management vendors. Companies such Indus and MRO took advantage of this opening and offered compelling functionality to the PeopleSoft, Oracle and SAP customer bases.

As the 1990s drew to a close, the boundaries of an ERP system expanded. The reason is twofold: 1) Adding extra functionality beyond a base ERP system allowed the ERP vendors to differentiate themselves, and 2) the ERP vendors realized they were leaving money on the table that the Best of Breed vendors were happy to take.

So ERP began to grow up in response to competitive market forces.

PeopleSoft, Oracle, JDEdwards and SAP added Supply Chain, CRM, and Advanced Warehouse functionality to their ERP systems at a rapid pace. While in most cases the early versions of these applications were still not competitive with the Best of Breed vendors, the tide was beginning to turn.

From 2000-2005, new versions of these offerings quickly began closing the functional gaps with the Best of Breed solutions. After 2006, the gaps had narrowed to the point where only those companies with extremely complex requirements had no alternative but the Best of Breed vendors. The Best of Breed companies that had flourished in the 1990s were seeing their value proposition go away. As a result, almost all of the pure-play Supply Chain, CRM, and Asset Management vendors are now either gone or have been acquired.

Which brings us to PeopleSoft.

When PeopleSoft acquired JDEdwards in 2003, one of the hidden gems was JDEdwards’s Asset Management capabilities. PeopleSoft quickly realized this and announced plans to take the Asset Management capabilities of JDEdwards, rewrite it in PeopleTools, and offer it to the traditional PeopleSoft customer base. When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, they reaffirmed this decision and accelerated the process. Release 8.9 first introduced Asset Lifecycle Management to PeopleSoft customers. This was quickly followed up with Release 9.0 which provided additional functional enhancements — and while Oracle isn’t talking, PeopleSoft Release 9.1 promises to deliver even more Asset Management functionality to its customers.

So just like the legacy CRM and Supply Chain vendors, the value proposition offered by the Best of Breed Asset Management vendors has eroded. Why? PeopleSoft now delivers Asset Management functionality that is very close or equals that of the few remaining Best of Breed vendors. And the need to build, support and maintain interfaces to third-party Asset Management systems has been eliminated.

In other words, PeopleSoft customers in asset-intensive industries can (finally) enjoy the tremendous benefits of integration without sacrificing functionality. Integration means enterprise-wide visibility of a company’s assets. Integration means no islands of automation. And integration means saving them money — lots of money.

The market has spoken with their dollars. ERP customers like integration, as fragmented patchwork systems have become synonymous with cost and complexity.  If you are a PeopleSoft customer and you manage assets, whether it’s a fleet of trucks, production equipment, multiple facilities, or laptops, consider the integration benefits offered by the PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management suite.

For more information on the PeopleSoft MM product, please email me or give us a call at 800-774-5187.  In addition, you can check out Oracle’s website and download some of the collateral related to the product.  If you’d like more of a in-depth primer on PeopleSoft MM’s and a deeper explanation of its benefits (especially compared to point solutions), download our free whitepaper entitled PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits.

Previously:

PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Real Estate Management: A Deeper Look
An Introduction to PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management
Sneak Peek: PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1
PeopleTools 8.5: A Look Inside

Related whitepapers (PDF):

PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits

Related web content:

MiPro Consulting: PeopleSoft Services
MiPro Consulting: Resources

It’s become a habit for companies in their marketing to acknowledge the state of the economy today.  It’s as if they believe that if they acknowledge that times are tough, then immediately they’ll bond with their customers and all will be well.  Because, you know, customers will get that these companies understand.

There’s more to it that that.

Saying something and backing that up with corporate behavior are two vastly different things.  One costs nothing, the other can get massively expensive, exposes the company to risk, and requires buy-in from a culture level. And that’s where JetBlue walks the walk instead of just paying lip service to a saturated meme.

Basically, JetBlue promises that if you lose your job, they will refund your fare.  This is to help customers feel safe when booking flights, as JetBlue noticed customers were waiting longer and longer to book flights:

A spokesman said JetBlue launched the program not because customers were asking for refunds, but because the airline has noticed that passengers are waiting to the last minute to buy tickets, a sign of nervousness about their finances.

The discount carrier said it initially will offer the program for U.S.-originating travel booked between Feb. 1 and June 1, but that could be extended. JetBlue said a low-fare U.K. regional carrier, Flybe, recently announced a similar policy.

JetBlue said that if the person is listed on the itinerary and personally paid for the ticket, he or she can apply for a refund no less than 14 days before the scheduled departure of the outbound flight. Normally, JetBlue tickets are nonrefundable, and passengers are assessed a $100 change fee to use the remaining ticket credit for a new trip.

JetBlue accomplishes two things with this:

1. Makes its customers feel safe spending money with JetBlue, because there is a safety net.  Unlike other companies out there nickel-and-diming their customers to death, JetBlue is demonstrating that it understands the money is tight, people are apprehensive, and buying behavior can’t be treated as business-as-normal.  JetBlue just doesn’t say it understands, it shows it.
2. Wins enormous positive word-of-mouth.  Jason Averbook, one of MiPro’s partners and colleagues, said it best when he heard the news: “I will fly JetBlue whenever I can based on reading this.”  Amen.  If a company will actually refund cash to me should I lose my job when technically and legally it has no reason to do so, that’s remarkable.  I’ll give my money all day long to companies who are innovative and brave enough to stand up and do something like this.

Why aren’t tons of companies doing stuff like this?  Because it takes outright commitment to the idea and organizational bravery.  And today, like it or not, most companies are sitting around trying to figure out to hold on to their cash, not disburse it to would-be customers on whom negative personal circumstances fall.

Bravo JetBlue.  And to the other airlines: are you watching this?