The exchange rate entry orchestration is a great example of how the Orchestrator can easily automate a repetitive business process.
What It Does and What Makes It Amazing
This orchestration pulls data from exchange rate websites and imports it into JDE on a daily basis.
It was simple to build.
This particular orchestration was first designed by the attendees at one of our ACBM training classes. They decided to work through a break when the instructor wasn’t in the room and they already had the proof of concept done by the time the training session resumed. Citizen developers rock!
It was ridiculously cheap.
Building this orchestration took about an hour and didn’t cost any additional fees since Orchestrator comes with JDE as part of the Core Tools and Infrastructure license. Accomplishing the same automation with an outside software vendor could have cost 10k+/year. The ROI was immediate and substantial.
This was such a good example that we now teach it in all our training classes.
How the Exchange Rate Orchestration Was Built
The solution is simple and elegant. As you can see, there are just three boxes.
Building an orchestration tends to be easiest when you start at the end and work backward to the beginning. This allows you to begin with the goal in mind by asking the most important question: What needs to be in JDE?
The first box we built is a form request. (Remember, this is the 3rd box in the orchestration screenshot since we are building backward.)
We set the following fields
- “from” and “to” currency
- Effective Date
- Exchange Rate
This form returns the data desired and hits return to save it and close out. So, we are simply automating the steps the user takes to enter a rate manually.
Next, we needed a connector to pull the exchange rate data from an outside source.
Inside the connector are the following selections/actions:
- Select the connection
- Select the effective date to retrieve data from
- Set parameters (base currency)
- Set access key (for authorization)
- Get the output
This connector can return as many different rates as you want and all these can be used in future steps.
What is the Groovy Script for? The final piece of the puzzle was designed to fix the dates. In JDE, dates are entered in many possible formats such as month/day/year. When you call an API, you can’t have slashes in the URL. The Groovy Script replaces the slashes with dashes to reformat the date.
That’s it. Three simple steps and you have an orchestration that saves time and money.
Putting the Orchestration into Action
If you put this orchestration on a schedule, you can pass the system date through as the effective date. Then, everything works automatically and you don’t need any human intervention. You can grab exchange rates for as many currencies as you need. You can also add a message or notification to let users know that the rates were updated.
Are You Ready to Start Building Exactly What You Need?
Opportunities like this are why we ask our participants to bring their use cases to private training sessions. There’s no better way to get instant ROI. Plus, your team can go on to build countless additional orchestrations over the coming months and years.
Sign your team up for customized training or contact us to build what you need fast.