Earlier this month, JDA Software announced availability of JDA Manufacturing Planning, described as an innovative in-memory based supply chain planning platform to support an always-on supply chain. Supply Chain Matters via this author, had the opportunity to be briefed regarding this newly announced functionality, and we were impressed with the progress that JDA has made in providing what appears to be comprehensive supply chain planning support built on a more advanced in-memory platform architecture. Â The platform will no doubt enhance the competitiveness of JDA in the supply chain planning technology area and help to correct perceptions that JDA has strayed away from supply chain planning needs other than Retail and Omni-channel based.
JDA Manufacturing Planning®, Releases 2016 and 2016A, provides a broad series of supply chain planning applications which customers can adopt in an overall transformation or upgrade plan. Applications themselves are broad, spanning supply chain network design, demand, supply and inventory planning, order promising as well as sales and operations planning process support needs.  Included are abilities to support contingency, landed cost and margin aware scenario planning as well as predictive or prescriptive analytics techniques. A lot of effort has been obviously focused on improvement of persona-based user interfaces and added user productivity features that will be familiar to experienced users of Microsoft Excel®.  Dashboards are less fixed and now provide more flexibility for user-defined options.
JDA has additionally added a pre-packaged Fast Track Implementation process, targeting a 3-6-month timeframe in assisting customers in quicker time-to-benefit related to this platform
Perhaps the most compelling feature of the platform is JDA’s efforts to leverage always-on, advanced in-memory distributed computing framework and grid fabric technologies built over an Oracle RDBMS data persistence foundation that supports advanced optimization and heavy data lifting, combining data and business logic as one routine. The net result for users is the ability to view, assess and address the impacts of either or both product demand or product supply changes in a more real-time environment.
From our lens, SAP ERP and SAP SCM users attempting to implement SAP HANA based in-memory capabilities for supply chain planning now have another alternative. Also by our lens, this platform provides a potential challenging alternative to Kinaxis’s Rapid Planning suite, depending on how both vendors compete on price and services.
There are some shortcomings. JDA missed an opportunity to leverage this platform to also include supply chain execution and deeper customer fulfillment data, making this closer to a true supply chain control tower support capability. Further missing was the ability to take greater advantage of JDA’s new development collaboration with Google for inherent Cloud-based platform capabilities. Having now moved on from the prior reported Honeywell acquistion to now a white knight with a renewed level of business funding, the opportunity still remains to include supply chain execution elements provided from the elements of RedPrairie and to augment this platform in an overall Google Cloud offering.
None the less, the landscape of supply chain planning technology has become much more competitive and customers now have more compelling options in which to consider. The other interesting twist is that of Oracle which from behind the scenes is providing other alternatives to supply chain and integrated business planning migration paths not predicated solely of the adoption of SAP HANA.
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