The global retail industry is now being driven by consumer insights. This is the new normal where demand-driven supply chain, a decade old concept, is a reality that no retailer can afford to ignore. The retail scene in India, one of the fastest growing markets in the world, is no exception. This is where, JDA Software, with more than 4,000 customers around the world, is helping retailers in India leverage this disruption and to profitably deliver to their customers.
According to Girish Rishi, CEO, JDA Software, India is a fast growing market for JDA. “We have grown 80 percent year-over-year in the last two years. Seven of the top 10 retailers in India leverage JDA to optimize their supply chain across dimensions such as category management, assortment planning, optimizing store operations and warehouse operations and all of the top five grocery and convenience retailers in India use JDA for space and category management.”
Focus on India Retail
JDA’s focus on India retail can be established by the fact that this software provider offers a unique 30-day engagement approach that is exclusively aimed at Tier I and II retailers locally.
“We offer this limited-period engagement approach in association with our partners in India like HCL, TCS, EY and Accenture. During this period, we ingest retailer data, format and structure the unstructured data and derive valuable insights for them using JDA’s retail planning and execution capabilities. This allows us to showcase how we can deliver a nimble and agile response in a 30-day capacity prompting retailers to understand and evaluate what JDA can do,” states Rishi.
This process begins with understanding immediate pain points of retailers and correlates those to possible blockages in their supply chains. These can be common scenarios like retailers ending up with too much inventory or the exact opposite of that when the demand is high. At this point, JDA decides what tools can the company bring in at the system hygiene level to plug the gaps identified. This could be using a JDA product like JDA Demand Forecasting, JDA Warehouse Management or JDA Assortment that would provide quick insights so that the retailer can benefit. This becomes the basis of JDA’s long-term relationship with these retailers.
“We deliver real results to retailers because we have been working data science for 30 years. We were the original data science company! We acquired companies like i2 Technologies, Manugistics, and RedPrairie, and we have a very large capability in India alone. Over 2,000 of us are supporting product development and engineering, and professional services. This proximity to the marketplace coupled up with our partners provide us an edge locally in the India market where the consumer is very vibrant,” Rishi further explains.
A good example here would be Shoppers Stop with whom the company has worked for over 20 years now where JDA is seen as a trusted advisor today.
Software-as-a-Service
Not just in India, but retailers around the globe consider JDA a partner because JDA helps them to stay current in real-time with consumer demand and at the same time allows them to focus on their core business. This is made possible by JDA’s Software-as-a-Service or SaaS solutions that not only helps retailers reduce their IT spends but also gives them back the their time they needed to spend in data centers and application management. “What we like to tell our customers is that you go on SaaS with us, that’s your last upgrade. You’ll never have to worry about another upgrade. It’s our responsibility,” states Girish.
JDA is farthest ahead in the retail industry with their SaaS capability. No wonder, JDA is the only company named a leader by Gartner across all five Magic Quadrants that cover supply chain and retail merchandising solutions.
Next Generation Supply Chain Solutions
JDA’s next generation solutions extend its leading end-to-end portfolio through market-leading edge technologies. Aptly named, JDA LuminateTM, these solutions embrace the cloud, IoT, AI/ML, advanced analytics and cross-platform integration to provide complete supply chain visibility and prescriptive recommendations that enable more accurate, profitable business decisions.
Built on a cognitive, connected real-time platform, Luminate solutions boast of a built-in network control center. It’s a SaaS solution that senses unexpected events across the supply chain, identifies potential impact of such disruptions and orchestrates subsequent corrective action with machine learning-based prescriptive guidance.
India Partner Network
With a strategic partnership with Microsoft, JDA is all set to take their ongoing SaaS momentum to the next level.
“JDA applications deliver seamless customer experiences across cloud, on-premise, and edge solutions. Our strategic partnership with Microsoft accelerates JDA’s mission as the supply chain platform company, enabling our broad ecosystem of joint partners and developers to further leverage our AI/ ML-based solutions,” asserts Rishi.
Autonomous Supply Chain
With its recent acquisition of Blue Yonder, the market leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions for retail and supply chain, JDA accelerates towards its vision of Autonomous Supply ChainTM.
“This allows JDA to tackle a myriad of customer challenges such as critical spend and demand analyses, intra-day forecasting and precisely predicting ETAs and inventory availability, all of which are crucial success factors across the retail, supply chain and logistics industries,” concludes Rishi.
