Marketplace Perceptions Rarely Reflect Reality (at least in this case)

 

What’s wrong with this picture?

Back in 2014, Lora Cecere (a well-regarded supply chain consultant, researcher and blogger) wrote a post called Preparing for the Third Act. She said “JDA has used the maintenance stream from customers as an annuity income base with very little innovation into manufacturing applications. While there has been some funding of retail applications, customers are disappointed.”

Our experience is consistent with Lora’s assessment. We’ve been working in the trenches on this for the last 20 years and that opinion is also shared by many of our colleagues in the consulting ranks.

In fact, we have first-hand experience with customers who have been disappointed and with customers who are delighted. That puts us in a unique position.

What’s going on now makes no sense. You can buy the software that disappoints, but you can’t buy the software that does not disappoint. To make things even more absurd, the same company (JDA) has both software packages in its stable.

Retailers agree that planning all of their inventory and supply chain resources based on a forecast of sales at the retail shelf makes perfect sense. Additionally, manufacturers agree that getting time-phased replenishment schedules based on those plans from their retail customers provides significant additional value across the extended supply chain.

But because you can only buy the software that disappoints, most of the implementations will likewise be disappointing. Consequently, the perception of these systems in the marketplace is fairly negative.

It shouldn’t be. These systems can work very well.

First, a brief history of where this all started and how we got where we are today.

Initially, retailers had a choice between time-phased planning software designed for the manufacturing/distribution market or software designed for retail that couldn’t do time-phased planning.

Later, software was developed specifically for the mission: time-phased planning at store level. It could handle gigantic data volumes economically, is easy to use and easy to implement. It’s suitable for a small company (a handful of stores) and has been tested with volumes up to 450 million item/store combinations on inexpensive hardware.

Unsurprisingly, a square peg forced into a round hole (systems initially designed for use in manufacturing plants and distribution centres being applied to store level) yielded the disappointing results.

Also unsurprisingly, a system designed specifically to plan from store level back to manufacturers works just fine. In fact, our client (a mid-market Canadian hard goods retailer) is now planning every item at every store and DC, sharing schedules with suppliers, managing capacities and achieving extraordinary business results.

No doubt, the problem has been solved.

So what’s the path forward?

It’s in everybody’s best interest to work together.

From JDA’s perspective, this is a new wide-open market for them – and it’s enormous. But it won’t be developed if the marketplace perceives that implementing these systems delivers disappointing results.

In the event that JDA were to develop a new system with new technology and features appropriate to a retail business, they still need to build it, sell it to some early adopters, get it working well and rack up a few unequivocal success stories before they can begin to overcome the current level of customer disappointment.

How long will all of that take? An optimistic estimate would be 2 years. A realistic one is more like 3-5 years. Will there still be a market then?

From the retailer’s and manufacturer’s perspective, they can be saving tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per year (depending on size) and providing a superior consumer experience.

From the consultant’s point of view (the people who recommend and implement these systems for a living), having the ability to implement the software that isn’t being sold – but has been proven to work  will increase the number of implementations with outstanding results (rather than disappointing results). The net effect of this is that JDA will have more revenue and more success than if they continue to keep this software off the market. JDA has made this type of arrangement with other partners to their mutual benefit, without head-butting or causing confusion in the marketplace.

It could be that JDA is too close to the problem to see this as a solution.

Maybe Blackstone can look at situations like this more objectively and without bias, unencumbered from all that’s transpired to date.