J.D. Edwards & Company - Oneworld

ONEWORLD

The OneWorld Suite is the flagship of J.D. Edwards' product line. It is a Web-enabled collection of business applications, a set of integrated components that can be assembled and disassembled to best serve the needs of a particular company. Released in 1997, OneWorld was designed from the ground up as a comprehensive component software architecture. It was one of the very first such systems on the market. OneWorld's architecture is a hierarchy comprised of six levels of components. Each level is constructed from the pieces in the next lower level. OneWorld's power and versatility come from its ability to combine its nearly 45,000 components to carry out a broad variety of business functions.

OneWorld's first level is comprised of about 30,000 predefined data elements, which constitute the building blocks of the system. The low-level components identify and store the most basic information and perform very simple calculations on that information. OneWorld users can also define new data elements. The second level is made up of tables and so-called business views, which assemble data from the first level and organize it into tables. Functions, such as joining or filtering, are also performed on the tables at this level to prepare them for the third level, business functions. There are nearly 3,000 business functions, each one of three types: field, line, or master. The nuts-and-bolts work of business is first apparent at this level. Field business functions control particular data fields in the application—price, for example. Line business functions control specific lines in a business form, for example, the third line of an invoice. Master business functions are set up to handle larger composite entities such as an entire purchase order.

Complex business functions, such as maintaining an accounting ledger, are performed in one of two modes, interactive and batch applications, at OneWorld's fourth level. The fifth level, OneWorld solutions, are programs that integrate all the lower-level business functions and application modes into complete, full-blown applications for different business activities, such as human resources, manufacturing, or finance. At the top-most level, OneWorld Vertical Market Suites, components are combined for the needs of specific industries, including energy, chemicals, engineering and construction, and public services.

OneWorld was designed to run on the Windows or UNIX operating systems, as well as on the IBM AS/400 platform, the system with which J.D. Edwards first made its name. A later version, OneWorld XE, included an "interoperability engine" that made it possible for users to integrate specific applications from different software or platforms, as well as from companies other than J.D. Edwards. A Hurwitz Group white paper on OneWorld called the package "a compelling choice for companies that recognize the importance of the technological and business cases for componentization."