Best Practice Solution Set
Quote to Order, No Guesswork:
How Integrating Salesforce and JDE Cuts Through the Chaos
In building products manufacturing, a lot can go wrong between the time a quote is approved and when a shipment goes out the door. It’s not unusual for systems like Salesforce and JDE to operate completely separately, and that’s exactly where problems start
Teams end up re-entering data by hand. Product codes. Line items. Quantities. And that introduces risk. One typo means the wrong materials go out. One delay in data entry means an order misses its window. Multiply that across hundreds of quotes, and it’s easy to see how things break down.
That’s why connecting Salesforce to JDE makes such a big difference. By building an integration that pushes accepted quotes directly into the ERP, we eliminated the need for duplicate entry and gave a clear, automated handoff from sales to fulfillment.
The Challenge: Manual Entry Slowing Everything Down
It’s a typical process; once a quote was approved, someone had to manually create the order in JDE. Depending on complexity, this could take anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour per quote. And if a project called for multiple phased deliveries—common in long-term construction work—that time ballooned.
On top of that, the team was working from a patchwork of spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. No central place to track which quotes had been fulfilled or which ones were still in progress. It was tedious, slow, and vulnerable to error.
The Integration: Simple Trigger, Smart Delivery
We built the integration using MuleSoft, and it follows a real-time, event-driven model:
- Triggered by Salesforce: When a release record is created, MuleSoft pulls in the relevant data and formats it for JDE.
- Unidirectional flow: Data moves one way—from Salesforce to JDE. Once it’s sent, Salesforce updates the release with a status and logs the result.
- FTP-based delivery: The client’s JDE system didn’t have an API, but it did have an established pipeline that was triggered via an SFTP server. MuleSoft generates a custom-formatted file and places it on the SFTP server, where it’s automatically picked up and inserted into JDE for order processing.
A key detail: the file format wasn’t standard. It wasn’t a CSV or XML. It was a proprietary structure unique to their setup. But MuleSoft gave us the flexibility to match it exactly, without changing how the client worked.
Fulfillment That Fits the Way They Operate
One major requirement was the ability to support partial fulfillment. In construction, it’s common for teams to ship materials in stages, especially on large jobs. The release object in Salesforce lets users select specific items and quantities to ship. That subset gets passed to JDE, processed, and tracked—all automatically.
The integration also includes log records for every transaction, right inside Salesforce. If something fails, admins can see what happened and why, without needing to pull in a developer. That kind of transparency builds trust and gives non-technical teams the tools to do their jobs better.
Real Value, Measured in Time
Since rolling out the integration, the team reports saving the equivalent of half a full-time headcount employee, just from reduced data entry and order coordination. And that’s not including the gains in accuracy, visibility, and team alignment.
It’s not just faster. It’s better. Because now, the systems work together. And the team does, too.
A key detail: the file format wasn’t standard. It wasn’t a CSV or XML. It was a proprietary structure unique to their setup. But MuleSoft gave us the flexibility to match it exactly, without changing how the client worked.
