Girish Rishi, CEO Every year JDA Software’s to-do list is brimmed with innovative strategies and recommendations to scale its prominence in omni-channel retail, and supply chain planning. As a part of the ir key advancements, the company collaborated with Google to deliver JDA’s next generation cloud-based solutions via Google Cloud Platform. With this strategic movement towards the future of retail supply chain, JDA won the position in Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2015. Building upon this tactical partnership with Google, a year later JDA announced the general availability of its unique SaaS-based offering, JDA Retail.me Assortment Planning powered by Google Cloud technology. The solution brings together the art and science of retail planning and delivers intelligent, customer-centric assortment planning capabilities that empower retailers to connect product selection, ranging and buying decisions with customers through big data intelligence. Fueled by JDA Labs and Google Cloud data science innovation, JDA Retail.me is a simple to use solution that enables retailers to understand actual buying preferences by customer segment to forecast and score assortment performance and recommend actions to drive optimal pre-trade and in-trade decisions. JDA believes that its positioning as a pioneer in the retail cloud space along the completeness of vision axis is a testament to the momentum behind the company’s establishment of innovative solutions like Retail.me.
Strategic Game Changer
When it comes to retail supply chain, it is highly essential for retailers to gain visibility and streamline operations, improve financial effectiveness, and optimize customer fulfillment in the new multichannel environment. Cloud technology is just the “right weapon” to not only gain insights from data collected from across the store but also “valuable armor” to win the game of simplifying retail supply chain management. Retailers today invest heavily on business software, designed to automate their business processes; however, most of the time, they lack the capability to collect data to operate efficiently. The cloud supply chain eliminates these problems by enabling companies to pass information across their business networks, and do so in real-time so that all partners are on the same page. Leveraging the cloud, JDA assists retailers in defining and adding efficient delivery models for specific customer or product segments at a much faster pace than with traditional IT projects.
JDA Stratus is designed to enable faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership and rapid return on investment for customers
The way JDA rethinks delivery of retail supply chain solution over cloud can be understood through its approach of segmenting the company’s solution portfolio. One group of JDA’s core retail omni-channel applications is only focused for functional enhancements but will not be re-architected for the Google Cloud. Another group of those core applications (Demand, Fulfill, TMS, others) are re-architected for the cloud and the third in the series of new to the world cloud-based applications, Retail.Me.
New Nimble, Out-of-the-box Cloud Offerings
JDA is the right place for retailers to amplify their performance. The company’s end-to-end retail and supply chain planning and execution technology is designed to address the complexities of today’s omni-channel model and consumer-driven marketplace. From planning to delivery, the company’s nonpareil, cloud-based solutions help retailers reduce costs, increase profitability and improve collaboration enabling them to deliver on their customer promises every time.
With customer-centricity and flexibility as its key cornerstones, and in an attempt to combine the benefits of its reliable and powerful solutions through out-of-the-box cloud deployments, JDA launched its new cloud service offering—JDA Stratus. It comes to clients’ table as a pre-packaged Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud offering, aimed at customers that want to leverage the full power and capabilities of JDA’s cutting- edge supply chain and retail solutions through an economical, flexible and template-based deployment scope. JDA Stratus is designed to enable faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership, and maximize rapid return on investment for customers. The company has invested its 30 years of best practices and templates specific to its retail industry, and have built JDA Stratus that sets up customers up and running with JDA quickly, while banking on a best-in-class, reliable cloud environment and ‘always on’ support.
Currently, JDA Stratus is available in three pre-packaged offerings. First off, JDA Stratus for Workforce Management includes the company’s workforce and task management modules as well as mobility options to swiftly address the complexities of workforce environments. Combining the company’s transportation management and transportation planner modules, JDA Stratus for Transportation helps companies in realizing the transportation savings faster, while still meeting customer delivery windows.
Finally, to ensure that inventory is located properly across fulfillment nodes throughout the supply chain based on demand fluctuations, JDA Stratus for Forecast and Replenishment blends the JDA Fulfillment and JDA Demand modules available for retailers. JDA Stratus perfectly falls in line with JDA’s mission of giving customers flexible choices for the type of cloud deployment that will work best for their business needs.
Positioning Companies for Success
There is no better way to illustrate the benefits that JDA provides than elaborating a customer engagement. One of the largest value retailers in South Africa, Massdiscounters (Pty) Ltd, recognized the need to re-evaluate its best-of-breed technology strategy to expand its significant presence in sub-Saharan Africa. Massdiscounters’ previous technology solution was inefficient to cope well with their new tiered supply chain structure. There was a limited support for demand forecasting, and the client needed a new solution, which could gather other applications around, to steer them into the future. Thereby, the client recognized the need to onboard a supply chain solution that could create a unified fulfillment system for new multi-tier supply network. In an attempt towards post profitable growth, Massdiscounters decided to move from a best-of-breed to a best-of-suite strategy, selecting JDA’s demand management, replenishment and promotions optimization solutions. Implementing solutions like JDA Demand and JDA Fulfillment via the cloud, Massdiscounters acquired the ability to interact beyond the fulfillment level. The ability to understand demand at a granular level created new power and new responsibility for the planning team at Massdiscounters. “We have started to see the benefits of focusing upstream and focusing on the demand,” says Steve Pearson, Replenishment Executive, Massdiscounters. “We have gained competitive advantage, getting insight into our business processes.” With the help of JDA, Massdiscounters supports more accurate demand forecasting and more efficient fulfillment across an expanded, multi-tier supply chain. At JDA, success of customers is the priority.
"JDA is right place for retailers to amplify their performance"
Preparing for the New Age Retail Planning
With fearless leaders onboard, JDA is breaking the boundaries and devising innovative solutions that are instrumental in improving retailers’ collaboration so that they can deliver on their customer promises every time. “Our customers are undergoing enormous change with omnichannel, new dynamics in the global supply chain and automation at the edge with a trend toward the Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and analytics,” says Girish Rishi, CEO, JDA Software. Rishi cites the opportunities to digitize “last mile” logistics execution through the Internet of thing (IoT), and other visibility tools. This approach would give JDA a completely different direction. It is the “last mile” train where Rishi is planning to push JDA to go next, accelerating the current efforts.
