Logistics IT ecosystem on display

   This year’s user conference of supply chain software developer JDA ballooned into the biggest event the company has ever held.
   Around 2,700 attendees convened in early May to discuss best practices and practical uses of the broad-reaching software that touches the transportation, warehousing, demand planning, and inventory departments, among many others.
   Those are big numbers for a conference under any circumstance, and they can be partly explained by the merger of JDA and RedPrairie earlier this year.
   But it doesn’t speak to the whole story — this wasn’t merely a merging of the customers of JDA and RedPrairie into one super event. For one, there are about 400 common customers, none of whom were double-counted.
   This spoke more about the broad horizontal and vertical reach JDA now has after a decade of significant acquisitions and mergers. As JDA executive vice president of sales Tom Dziersk said at a press briefing at the event, there are some customers who consider JDA more of a core system for their business than their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from Oracle or SAP.
   The challenge for JDA going forward is to maintain its strength in the large enterprise market, and build inroads in the mid-market segment. Its foray into cloud services is a major step in that direction. The more immediate, granular challenge is transitioning its customers using to-be-phased-out products to its new portfolio going forward.
   That roadmap is being laid out, but in the meantime Chief Executive Officer Hamish Brewer said JDA has committed to supporting any and all products under the JDA or RedPrairie banners until that transition can take place.
   Brewer said during the briefing that the company is already seeing some tangible benefit from the merger. He said JDA has customers that said they were going to bolt to a competitor, but have decided to stay based on the potential benefits of integrating the RedPrairie and JDA product suites, even if a particular product was better at another company.
   “We don’t have to explain to the customers why this makes sense,” he said. “They get it.”
   The event provided a snapshot of how companies choose, integrate, and then use supply chain software to optimize complex supply chain processes. While our focus was trained on developments in JDA’s transportation management system (TMS), it’s hard to deny that functions like demand planning, warehousing, and inventory have a deep connection to logistics.
   It’s all linked, which is what makes a conference with so many users with seemingly disparate jobs so compelling.
   One particular conversation caught my eye — a session on the first day with a couple big names in U.S. retail. The conversation wasn’t so much about the uses of any specific system, as it was about how companies should prepare themselves to maximize the benefits of cutting-edge technology.
   It was really about change management, a topic that I keep hearing again and again in relation to logistics and transportation. It was also a key focus area of American Shipper’s recent Global Trade Management Landscape Report. The idea that in order to realize the benefits of automation, or complex algorithms that optimize things like rating and routes, your organization must be ready to change how it does things.
   “When you realize the benefit of a world-class system, you need to change your business processes,” Robin Bornkamp, vice president of inventory and demand planning for Lowe’s, said during the session. “Why spend money on a system and not utilize it? We were arrogant to think we could do it better than a system. We bought software but didn’t know where we wanted to end up.”
   She said that if end-state decisions are made by people in the C-suite, companies should make sure those executives understand the ramifications of what they are going to go through.
   Meanwhile, Matt Fischer, vice president of inventory management at Michael’s Stores, admitted “we’ve had successful initiatives and unsuccessful ones.”
   The best initiatives, he said, are ones where the company started from scratch.
   “Where we wiped away everything on the white board,” he said. “Don’t just try to make what we already do faster, let’s redesign it.”
   That seems to me to be a hiccup that organizations struggle with on a number of levels — the status quo. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The problem is, “broke” is a bad determiner of whether a company needs to wipe its whiteboard clean.
   If a company, for instance, has been managing international transportation operations in a manual, spreadsheet-based way, that way may not be “broken.” Shipments are moving, goods are being delivered, maybe not in the optimal way, but the business is not “broken.”
   But if that same company decides to use a TMS, how can it not totally reconsider how it handles transportation management? Functions that require time-consuming spreadsheet management can now be handled in an automated electronic environment. Even on that basic level, an organizational rethink of some sort is required.
   So how does this relate back to the user conference as a whole? For me, it came down to this: the more than 2,000 customers who attended the JDA event live and breathe the modules they use in their daily jobs.
   And yet there are dozens of providers across the TMS, global trade management, procurement, and payment landscapes, among other supply chain activities, that we tend to cover in less detail.
   All of their users similarly live and breathe their systems. And while these ecosystems often exist isolated from one another, the reality is that a growing percentage of logistics practitioners belong to at least one of these burgeoning ecosystems.
   The wider ecosystem of logistics IT has many converts. And yet, our recent research into import operations shows that two-thirds of companies still handle things in a manual, spreadsheet-oriented way.
   User conferences like JDA’s, and the IT ecosystem as a whole, have plenty of room to grow. And that growth will be dependent on companies not only deciding to adopt a system, but to prepare themselves for that adoption.