“We had a technology debt that had crawled up on us over the years and we needed to pivot on a technology, program, and portfolio front. We’ve made good headway with the launch of half a dozen or so Luminate offerings, with more to come.”
Retail is evolving, maturing into a more personalized and experiential scenario. Augmented reality, high-touch service, curated brick-and-mortar showrooms, and personalized advertisements and product assortments will be the standard. And data science brings consumer insights to drive this new retail reality, with deeply-personalized appointments and ultra-precise segmentation. As the lines among channels and devices blur, frictionless purchasing is the goal. Inspired by the exploding mobile view, ubiquitous connectivity, and the continuous development of omnichannel offerings, today’s customers expect a synchronized shopping event, instant gratification, and personalized offers no matter where or how they buy.
Accommodating this new landscape is a tall order for retailers, and very few are earning a profit at it so far. Doing so results in breaking down organizational silos and cutting through channel walls. It means throwing well-established business methods and old, disconnected systems out the window. To create a profit within unified commerce, you need fully integrated methods and technology for stores, economics, fulfillment, and preparation.
JDA Software consolidates transformational technology with best practices and expertise. These have been produced by helping hundreds of retailers shine in today’s customer-centric, omnichannel environment. The cloud-based JDA Retail Planning solution consolidates the world’s leading forecasting, planning and space management mechanisms. They equip retailers with the efficiency, agility, and intelligence they require to develop localized assortments and category plans that consistently draw, capture and retain market share.
Retail’s new planning paradigm
To be efficient, planning can no longer be conducted in cross-functional silos bound by artificial “annual” timeframes. Planning productions must break down the silos and adopt constant, real-time processes that anticipate and adjust to fluctuations in the market as they happen. JDA’s integrated planning solutions provide the tools to turn financial goals into inventory and assortment strategies that match product breadth and depth with localized preferences and tastes and align those plans to capacities and constraints inherent in the extended supply chain.
By adopting continuous, integrated planning processes to changing market conditions and consumer expectations — whether mid-season, post-season, early season or late — JDA Retail Planning helps infuse agility and intelligence into the entire enterprise to improve responsiveness, anticipate trends and expand margins.
JDA’s demand forecasting engine accounts for all demand signals holistically across the organization to provide an initial forecast that drives inventory investment and purchasing budgets as well as demand forecasts for in-season assortment management. Additionally, integrated pricing and promotion plans encourage predictions that result in inventory and assortment plans that are in sync with promotional demand spikes as well as fueling smarter, more targeted promotions that lead to fewer markdowns, better customer experiences, and fewer out-of-stocks.
Aligning to the supply chain
The ability to understand and align with supply chain constraints and capacity during the planning process is critical. Without such visibility, assortments and allocations are built in silos and ultimately lead to missed sales, out-of-stocks, and dissatisfied customers.
JDA Retail Planning helps you align with the supply chain by providing correct end-to-end planning processes with full supply chain visibility. Continuous planning processes not only anticipate anomalies based on supply chain constraints and capacity limitations but also help planners react more quickly to unplanned conditions to adjust course and incorporate alternate workflows.
When incorporating new items into the mix or new seasons into stores, retailers often rely on broadly defined customer segments that are confined to the retailer’s specific customer interactions rather than a holistic view of customer preferences and sections.
Retail Systems Research reports that 71 percent of leading retailers indicate that fragmenting customer segments make it harder to reach their customers. Assorting to parts is also problematic, with only 26 percent reporting the ability to assort against crucial customer segments. Assortment plans based on wedge assortments driven by store groups quickly lead to mismatches with shopper preferences missed opportunities and eroded margins.
JDA Retail Planning delivers embedded analytics that leverages new consumer insights to achieve “extreme localization” of assortment and category plans that align more closely with shopper preferences, fostering better experiences and higher brand relevancy. JDA Retail Planning integrates premier planogram tools with JDA’s industry-leading task engine to provide mobile tablet access to visual planograms in the store and chain-wide visibility into execution and compliance. Approved tasks are immediately communicated to the stores for execution. Comprehensive task tracking provides a clear understanding of assignments, status, and compliance rates to help make the most of every opportunity.
Luminate AI/ML
Customers are more difficult than ever – placing greater needs on your supply chain to be more creative, predictive, and capable of delivering to your customers when, how and where they require it. Like never before, companies depend on their supply chains to deliver differentiated customer activities and business outcomes. JDA delivers the industry’s most influential, end-to-end supply chain and retail solutions platform that the consumers and teams will love. Built to fulfill customer demand with personalization, immediacy, and convenience, their solutions combine and optimize business planning, execution, and workforce labor so they can rapidly deliver on their customers’ requirements and expectations.
Using an AI-driven platform, JDA creates a world of new opportunities, creating friction-free, curated global commerce to enable automated, actionable decision-making that increases revenue and profits while meeting the customer’s needs and the organization’s sustainability goals. And customers’ can extend the value of JDA’s platform by building your own robust applications and tools using the same micro-services that power JDA’s applications.
JDA’s end-to-end, AI-driven supply chain solutions assist leaders to innovate and operate the complexities of today’s global, consumer-driven marketplace. From design to delivery, these comprehensive, SaaS-based solutions help businesses reduce costs, increase profitability, and enhance collaboration to present on customer promises every time. With JDA Luminate, one can now harness the power of the cloud and cutting-edge discovery – such as IoT, SaaS, AI, advanced analytics and cross-platform combination – to drive smarter, more agile supply chain transformations for more comprehensive results.
With real-time distinctness across the digital supply chain, you’ll gain access to a built-in crisis command center that warns of impending disruptions and recommends remedial actions before those disruptions occur. JDA’s award-winning Luminate Control Tower enables customers’ to adjust demand and stock on the fly based on real-time data, as well as insights and prescriptive suggestions powered by machine learning (ML). Luminate Control Tower benefits ensure the supply chain decisions are both imperative and profitable.
Future Ahead
“Like our solutions, we have put together an end-to-end, immersive experience for NRF attendees to see concrete examples of AI and ML innovation at work, as well as specifications on how companies can infuse sustainable business systems to reduce waste, and their carbon footprints beyond their supply chains with JDA,” says Jon Carson, general manager, chief operating officer, JDA. JDA newly turned in some healthy figures in its Q2 completion 101% SaaS bookings growth, 23% overall bookings increase, and seven percent revenue growth. According to the company, these bearings are being driven by “strong interest” in its AI and ML capacities. Girish Rishi, CEO of JDA Software says, “Definitely our Luminate machine learning portfolio, that’s been a massive trigger. The interest we’ve seen in orders and pilots and deployment. But the core portfolio too, driven by Luminate, is significant. I would say a large portion of our growth and the results we are showing is due to the AI/ML portfolio, plus the Blue Yonder acquisition.”
Keeping pace with the new developments, in January, the company announced a joint product with JDA and Blue Yonder capabilities called Luminate Demand Edge, and in July they were openly able to announce HEMA as a winner [user]. “There are a plethora of other customers we can’t announce as they haven’t given us permission. The acquisition of Blue Yonder was heavily driven by our ambition to accelerate on our road map to launch new products. Our research a year ago is that there are enormous cultural similarities among JDA and Blue Yonder, and a year on that has been proved. We are alike spirits. We are both very substantiated, very machine-learning-based problem solvers.”
Overall, the JDA of now is a different company to the one Rishi inherited three years ago. “The product roadmap required to be rejuvenated. We had a technology debt that had crawled up on us over the years and we needed to pivot on a technology, program, and portfolio front. We’ve made good headway with the launch of half a dozen or so Luminate offerings, with more to come,” adds Rishi. “We signified nowhere from a cloud strategy standpoint. There was not a single product on a public cloud, and now with Microsoft, we’ve made important progress. We were primarily a direct association and we were doing it all. So by recasting JDA as a platform company, our importance, our focus on partners, integrators, and technology ecosystem, is now in full movement.”
