Logistics,News,Supply Chain | 119 days ago |

The emergence of the hyper-connected consumer and continued evolution of omni-channel commerce have left more than a few retailers struggling to differentiate themselves and survive.

In order to remain competitive and relevant, companies are waking up to the fact that they must quickly adapt and center their organizations around consumer-centric processes and organizational alignment.

With that in mind, JDA®Software Group, Inc., The Supply Chain Company®, announced on January 16, 2012, a new solution designed to improve and personalize the customer shopping experience, build consumer loyalty and drive profitability.

JDA® Customer Engagement is a single solution that addresses omni-channel commerce and optimization logic in real time. It helps optimize not only how retailers deliver goods to customers, but also the alignment of real-time supply processes and inventory to effectively source those goods.

“The retail industry is at a critical juncture in its history. Consumers today — empowered with mobile technology — have instant access to information that shapes what they buy, when and where they buy it, and at what price,” said Hamish Brewer, president and CEO, JDA Software. “These connected consumers determine which retail enterprises succeed and which fail. With JDA Customer Engagement we have developed a comprehensive approach to address this challenge now, in order to help retailers avoid becoming a victim in this rapidly changing retail environment.”

The Solution: JDA Customer Engagement
JDA Customer Engagement is designed to help retailers profitably achieve customer-centricity in every interaction through the following key capabilities:
Omni-Channel Commerce
JDA Customer Engagement offers the ability to provide critical information to everyone who interacts with the omni-channel customer. The solution is designed to enable in-store associates real-time access to customer details, understand cross-channel customer preferences and turn in-store visits into profitable, cross-channel customer engagements.

Profitable Promising
The profitable promising capabilities within JDA Customer Engagement help shape inventory utilization with days-of-supply calculations and profitability algorithms that ensure customer satisfaction. It offers visibility into what inventory is available in the store today and what will be available tomorrow, fulfilling customer needs for immediacy while improving profitability and consumer engagement opportunities.

Allocated Inventory Optimization
Delivering profitable promises requires both an understanding of real-time demand shifts and customer profitability, and the capability to respond strategically and dynamically to changes. Driven initially from the intended forecast for different channels and promotions, allocation optimization evaluates when inventory and demand shifts warrant changes in execution. This capability, designed to automate the alignment of inventory to customer demand in real time, is enabled by JDA’s patented allocated available-to-promise technology, successfully developed for a manufacturing environment and now optimized for retail.

Customer Order Management
Support for expanded customer touchpoints demands an order orchestration workflow flexible enough to support process steps that are configurable by interaction point as well as by fulfillment method. JDA Customer Engagement helps retailers avoid costly system replacements in favor of a configurable order lifecycle management tool designed specifically for the omni-channel environment.

Cross-Channel Price Execution
Cross-channel retailing requires the ability to develop consistent cross-channel pricing strategies that support growing promotional complexity and diverse delivery mechanisms. JDA Customer Engagement offers pricing capabilities that consider customer profitability and support multi-dimensional pricing rules, including rules for business-to-business and loyalty environments.
“While much past effort has been made to capture customer transactions within business intelligence tools, retailers still struggle to deliver that knowledge in real time to those interacting with customers,” said Wayne Usie, senior vice president, retail, JDA Software. “Consumers no longer have the time or patience for that old way of doing business — retailers must be able to operate in real time to avoid being left behind. JDA’s rich heritage of successfully transforming retail supply chains around the world makes us uniquely qualified to help retailers succeed in today’s consumer-connected environment. JDA Customer Engagement is designed to help them do just that.”

Delivered by JDA Cloud Services
JDA Customer Engagement is delivered by JDA® Cloud Services, which offers continuous value and investment protection for some of the world’s largest global supply chains. This means retailers can focus on their customers, rather than technology, to drive profitability throughout the retail supply chain. JDA Cloud Services offers retailers:

  • Rapid deployment
  • Faster time to value
  • Improved cost structure
  • Timely software upgrades
  • Risk mitigation
  • Solution confidence and technical peace of mind

Designed to Integrate With an Existing Infrastructure
Transformation to an omni-channel business model could seem like a daunting task for most retailers when they know that their IT infrastructure was never designed for this kind of challenge. JDA Customer Engagement has been built with this in mind, allowing retailers to deploy a state-of-the-art, real-time, omni-channel commerce platform on top of their existing legacy inventory and order management systems.

JDA will showcase JDA Customer Engagement at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) 101st Annual Convention and Expo in New York City, January 15-18, 2012. Attendees can visit JDA at booth no. 403 to learn more about the new solution and see a live demonstration.

Source: JDA