JDA Software FOCUS15 Report

1. VENDOR NOTE
.
JDA Software
A New Rejuvenated Company Catering
to the Entire Omnichannel Supply Chain
By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal Analyst
www.technologyevaluation.com
Technology
Evaluation Centers

2. JDA Software—A New Rejuvenated Company Catering to the Entire Omnichannel Supply Chain
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JDA Software—A New Rejuvenated Company Catering to the
Entire Omnichannel Supply Chain
The recent JDA FOCUS 2015 was a refreshing event, where the leading retail and
supply chain management (SCM) software vendor JDA revealed a drastic change
in company culture and continued to reinforce its unified platform for helping its
customers take a holistic approach to managing their supply chain needs. JDA,
with 400 active and granted patents and 4,000 customers to date, celebrated its
30th anniversary together with 2,000 attendees at the event. Headed by a new
CEO, JDA is looking to change its image from a vendor which had traditionally
carved out its future without much regard for the opinions of industry analysts
and market observers to a company that closely caters to changes in the market
and to its clients’ SCM needs during an age of omnichannel commerce and
digitalization.
Expanding Software Capabilities Through Acquisitions
Founded in the US in 1985, the company initially focused in the 1980s on offering
IBM hardware–based software and services to retailers (JDA actually started in
Canada in 1978 as an IBM mid-range systems reseller. Having been one of the first
business software companies to focus solely on retailers’ needs such as
merchandize and assortment planning, it quickly garnered an impressive global
retail install base. In 1998, JDA made the first major acquisition, Arthur Retail,
a provider of retail planning and allocation software. In 2000, JDA acquired
Intactix, a provider of solutions for retail space management, and in 2001, it
acquired E3 Corporation for its retail and wholesale distribution software.
Most of those acquired products were best-of-breed retail software solutions,
which JDA did not integrate or converge into a coherent strategy and platform.
In fact, JDA system implementations and integrations with enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems comprised lengthy engagements and hefty professional
services revenues.
Still, the competition in the retail space intensified with some astute acquisitions
in the 2000s by SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. JDA then acquired Manugistics in 2006
and i2 Technologies in 2010, expanding its product set with demand and supply
management, pricing optimization, and transportation and logistics solutions.
These acquisitions brought an ample SCM functional footprint to JDA, as well as
many suppliers and manufacturers customers to its fold (mostly food consumer
goods manufacturers from Manugistics and discrete manufacturers such as hi-
tech and automotive from i2). In fact, 79 of 100 CPG manufacturers are JDA
customers, and one of three cars are reportedly planned via JDA.

3. JDA Software—A New Rejuvenated Company Catering to the Entire Omnichannel Supply Chain
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The company merged with RedPrairie in 2012, and gained leading warehouse
management and workforce management (WFM) capabilities. JDA now had
arguably the best retail merchandizing solution in the market, at least the top
two supply chain planning (SCP) and sales & operations planning (S&OP) solutions,
as well as the best transportation management system (TMS), warehouse
management system (WMS), and WFM solutions. Transportation strategic
modeling and optimization capabilities are still second to none. But the company
was reactive to the market trends and customer requirements, such as offering
software hosting and managed cloud service, rather than visionary and proactive.
Developing a Unified Platform
But in 2013, JDA announced the release of JDA eight, a unified cloud-based SCP,
optimization, and business analytics software product that reflects the global
software trend of multi-product offerings on a single platform. The offering
contained more than 30 different products in an effort to connect critical supply
chain functions, from forecasting to transportation, with built-in business
analytics. But, while touting convergence, JDA eight did not include the former
RedPrairie’s products. JDA’s “platformization” really took shape in 2006 with the
scalability and configurability of the Java platform from the acquired Manugistics
and, in 2010, with the concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and
orchestration from i2’s platform (see figure 1).
Figure 1. JDA Platform Evolution
New CEO, New Company Culture
The company underwent a profound cultural change under new CEO and
Chairman Bal Dail, who took over in mid-2014. Dail came from the vendor’s new
owner New Mountain Capital, which had already done a decent job with Deltek
and RedPrairie.

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Figure 2. JDA CEO Bal Dail at JDA FOCUS 15
At the event, Dail candidly admitted JDA’s past arrogance and current promise
to engage customers, partners, and analysts. In late 2014, the vendor changed its
unexciting “JDA – the Supply Chain Company” mantra to “JDA – Plan to Deliver.”
The new branding had a bifurcated meaning: one denoting the software’s ability
to cater to the entire supply chain planning and execution cycle and the other
referring to the vendor’s intent to deliver its brand promise to its customers
and partners.
According to Dail, integrating the JDA products is high on the priority list, thus
making them easy to use. The new ambitious upcoming platform called JDA Flex
promises to integrate all of the JDA products, and provide a friendlier user
interface (UI) (see figures 1 and 3). It is based on various open source tools and
will have social, mobile, in-memory computing, big data, and other traits—it is
quite similar to what the competitor Infor has doing of late (ION, Ming.le,
CloudSuites, etc.). JDA Flex will be based on the concepts of enterprise service
bus (ESB), business process management (BPM)/process orchestration, business
activity monitoring (BAM), and others.
All new JDA products will be developed on the Google Cloud Platform, which was
picked as the preferred platform as a service (PaaS), while existing products will
be hosted in the IBM Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. JDA has had
its own in-memory capabilities since the launch of the aforementioned JDA eight
platform. However, given that many JDA customers are also SAP customers, JDA
FLEX will integrate with the SAP HANA platform for some shared big data analysis.

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Figure 3. JDA FLEX Architecture Layers
Along the lines of new UI and user experience (UX), there are new WMS
applications that are persona based and mobile enabled. The new prescriptive
configuration tool takes much of the complexity out of WMS implementations by
automatically configuring the WMS based on a series of simple questions asked of
the user. The new WMS UX is a series of role-based apps that contains workflows
for task completion in a user-friendly manner—even if the workflows extend
between systems.
Offering JDA Intelligent Fulfillment
Another major strategic endeavor for JDA is to be the “leader” in the broadest
meaning of supply chain. The company will focus on three major verticals:
manufacturing and distribution, retail and services, and logistics providers. Its vast
portfolio has been logically grouped into five major suites: retail planning,
manufacturing planning, intelligent fulfillment, category management, and store
operations. As one example of leadership and solving customers’ problems,
according to Dail, the vendor will offer intelligent stores and fulfillment, with the
goal of providing retailers with profitable omnichannel deliveries and helping
them better satisfy their customers.
The new reality is that the connected and empowered consumer is the new boss
of each retailer. Thus, retailers and their suppliers must have a next-generation of
SCM solutions that have the look and feel of consumer apps (on mobile devices
with simple apps and intuitive analytics), connectedness (via cloud, mobility,
social networks), and that can handle the convergence of the digital and physical
worlds. They need to shift from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach.
Instead of the linear supply chains of the past (plan, source, make, deliver), today
we all work in a networked way, with many of those roles changing over time

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(e.g., manufacturers being retailers as well). Thus, the entire network (i.e., all the
participants and trading partners) must execute against the single plan in an
extended enterprise due to the consumer demand volatility. The concept of
Flowcasting can help in that regard, i.e., why forecast what you can calculate? In
other words, retailers will still forecast based on their point of sales (POS) data,
but their suppliers should know the actual demand at the retail store.
Research shows that while 90 percent of retail sales still occur in the store and
65 percent of shoppers use digital means for their purchases, only 30 percent of
retailers offer the same data in-store and online and have inventory visibility over
their entire supply network. This type of visibility will help retailers conduct
profitable omnichannel customer commerce.
Figure 4. JDA Intelligent Fulfillment
But what about returns, which is a huge expense item? To provide intelligent
fulfillment as well as to better engage partners and ecosystem, JDA has recently
partnered with IBM, and will thereby supplement the JDA Intelligent Fulfillment
suite with e-commerce and distributed order management (DOM) capabilities.
The IBM partnership is progressing nicely, with a lot of work being done on the
integration using the aforementioned JDA FLEX platform (see figure 4). Intelligent
Fulfillment will enable the concepts of click and collect, destination-driven
planning (understanding the place of demand vs. the place of fulfillment, which
are often not the same in omnichannel), dynamic order splitting, and more.
Flowcasting, a key initiative of this year, which comes from former RedPrairie,
is being blended into the JDA Intelligent Fulfillment suite as the forecasting engine
that drives all of the planning decisions. Within the Intelligent Fulfillment suite,
Flowcasting feeds the replenishment and fulfillment planning process.

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Flowcasting also serves as an input to the Planning suite, of which supply chain
and operations planning (S&OP) is a key process.
Other Noteworthy SCM Capabilities
While the digital and physical worlds are converging, we should never neglect
the importance of labor in today’s omnichannel world, with retail stores becoming
fulfillment centers and light warehouses. In the WFM realm, JDA is bringing the
many advanced forecasting and scheduling capabilities of the store to the
distribution center (DC), such that the entire organization can optimize the
workforce across all upstream supply chain and store operations. With very
strong WFM capabilities in retail scheduling and forecasting and budgeting
(down to 15-minute granularity), JDA is increasingly competitive with the likes
of Kronos, Infor, Ceridian Dayforce, and Reflexis. JDA has also recently developed
a dozen or so mobile apps in WFM and WMS, which were another major
attraction at the conference.
Conclusion
The main message of the JDA FOCUS 2015 conference was that JDA is now a
different company with a different drive—trying to no longer innovate within silos,
but rather innovating in a coherent and synergistic manner for the benefit of the
entire organization. JDA aims to promptly respond to emerging market trends in
this age of digitalization and omnichannel commerce. The software vendor also
aims to holistically cater to its customers’ supply chain needs, from planning to
execution and delivery—and this is no small matter. Still, the company must
continue to solve its customers’ unique problems but without getting entangled in
endless special “one-off” projects that cannot be duplicated for other customers.
Retail.Me, the recently unveiled consulting service that leverages intelligent
customer analytics for retail assortments, may be able to help the vendor in this
regard. Retail.Me would be one good example of helping retailers with their
perennial problem—proper assortments and allocations to stores, without
engaging an army of consultants for years.

8. JDA Software—A New Rejuvenated Company Catering to the Entire Omnichannel Supply Chain
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