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Top of mind for every retailer is that you can't afford to have non-availability of product that’s in demand, either on the shelf or online. That means retailers – and anyone that competes with Amazon and Alibaba in fulfilment, cloud, and logistics - need a strategy to take on The Three 'A’s. But now, the proportion of the conversations that we are having with customers is about 60 percent top-line preservation and increasing revenue growth. Supply chain was primarily a profitability and margin lever. If you look at the last two or three decades, businesses looked at the supply chain as an opportunity to reduce costs and increase profitability, reduce inventory, streamline their networks. Every company has them on target and they want to make sure they don’t lose market share or customers to them. That’s not just for retailers those three apply to manufacturers and third-party logistics companies too. I like to call it a focus on The Three 'A’s: Aldi, Amazon, and Alibaba. If supply chain management has become more of a C-level issue, then it is a strategic, rather than a tactical and operational one? And if so, is that just a by-product of AI’s much-vaunted predictive capabilities, or something deeper? Rishi says:
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Some of that came onboard through the acquisition of Blue Yonder, which was completed a year ago. Increasingly, the predictive artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities of JDA’s applications promise customer organisations the ability to slice and dice operational data to predict future needs, rather than just react to peaks and troughs in the present. That means our engagements are much deeper, and we are getting access to the right levels laterally and vertically within organisations.”
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The third change may be self serving, but I think people are coming to trust and rely on JDA a lot more. Everywhere we see a great eagerness to deploy digitalisation technologies. I was with HEMA, a retailer in the Netherlands, and we’re meeting a major oil and gas company tomorrow. There’s an ‘activist’ approach that our customers are taking. The appetite to do it is much greater, the procrastination and the internal debate is reducing. The second thing is, the inclination to adopt agile capabilities is happening in a much more aggressive fashion now. In his three years at the helm, he’s seen a significant progression in the markets that his firm serves:ĭelivery of product is the number one item I hear from manufacturers, retailers and third-party logistics companies. So says Girish Rishi, CEO of retail and supply chain management technology provider JDA Software. It’s no more ‘that thing on the fourth floor’ it’s an imperative for all of them to keep the business alive and, ideally, in a thriving state. For all CEOs and boards of directors, I think there’s been a massive progression to supply chain becoming an imperative.