SCM on cloud: Winning solution for emerging markets

BANGALORE, INDIA: Around the world, Cloud computing provides new ways to benefit from a fast return on their supply chain investment, while at the same time avoiding hardware and infrastructure costs from weighing them down. The same is taking place in India, with companies realizing that Cloud computing has huge implications for Supply Chain Management (SCM). Cloud computing not only helps them improve forecast accuracy, but also provides more reliable demand visibility, which leads to enhanced customer delivery performance, improved cash flow and reduced inventory across the supply chain.

JDA Software, dealing in SCM, provide integrated planning and execution of solutions and services to help firms manage the entire supply chain through any channel. They aid firms through every step of the way, from the very first stage involving raw materials right to the final delivery into the customers hands.

JDA Cloud Services, a powerful Cloud delivery platform, enables JDA customers to achieve and maintain long-term value from their software investments, and companies to derive the greatest value and performance from JDA solutions.

Through a recent merger with RedPrairie in the December of 2012, JDA Software is a company that is in a unique position to provide manufacturers, distributors and logistics service providers with integrated supply chain planning and execution solutions robust enough to handle the complexities of today's global marketplace and real time enterprise. JDA Software's solutions are ideally suited to enhance the potential of end-to-end supply chain efficiency and control.

Mr. Rajeev Chadha, Country Manager, JDA India, is a professional with more than 15 years of experience in the cooperate world. Here, he speaks about how cloud computing provides enterprises new ways to benefit from a fast return on their supply chain investment, the implications it has on SCM, why the Indian market has a huge growth potential when it comes to SCM on the Cloud and more.

CIOL: How does cloud computing provide enterprises new ways to benefit from a fast return on their supply chain investment?

 

Rajeev Chadha: Today's enterprise decisions around supply chain investments are determined by promised return on investments, faster time to market and improved customer satisfaction. All the key benefits drive measurable bottom line benefits, and time to realize these benefits becomes a key factor in allocating capex. This is where cloud computing can help companies drive fast and sustained results.

 

JDA believes today's Cloud solutions should not only focus on providing "capacity" on demand, but "capability" on demand as well. Capacity via Cloud computing can help deliver a faster return on a company's supply chain investment through rapid provisioning of implementation and the testing and development of environments. Capability delivered via the Cloud can help organisations jump start the realization of benefits leveraging global best practices without going through a ramp up period for their internal planning teams.

 

At JDA, we can launch JDA software solutions in the Cloud via the JDA Implementation Lab which enables customers to select from a set of configurable options that then drives a repeatable, rapid deployment execution model. This process balances speed, agility and readiness, dramatically reducing deployment times and improving time-to-value.

 

Once the solutions have been deployed in the Cloud, customers can turn over management of those solutions to a third party, allowing them to focus on additional projects that deliver incremental business results. For JDA customers deploying solutions in the Cloud, that means hardware and software management for JDA solutions, application and hardware infrastructure management and managed deployment, test and production environments to support system upgrades and enhancements of JDA solutions. Service coverage includes 24/7 response, technical upgrades, JDA application and batch monitoring, and database and middleware management.

 

JDA Cloud optimized services address the issues around capability by enabling customers to enhance and transform their supply chain by expanding their internal teams to include JDA expertise and standardized, repeatable processes that yield consistent results. Moving beyond simply organizing information, JDA Cloud Optimizes team work hand in hand with customers to generate concrete recommendations and actionable plans ready for execution. The results are contextually relevant insights into big data challenges facing every global enterprise today. Cloud optimizes recommendations help customers improve business responsiveness by taking full advantage of JDA software solution capabilities.

 

CIOL: Elaborate how Cloud computing has huge implications for SCM?

 

Rajeev Chadha: The greatest impact is on a company's ability to free up internal resources, reduce risk and gain faster time to value.  Specifically, JDA Cloud Services empowers customers by applying our deep industry and solution expertise to achieve the greatest value and performance from JDA solutions in less time, with lower risk, and at an improved cost. JDA offers a range of customer solutions in the Cloud from rapid deployment through optimization to enable sustained business growth. Beyond just hosting solutions at a data center or managing applications, JDA Cloud Services enhances JDA software by providing the environment, support, management, expertise, analysis, insight and recommendations that ensures that customers achieve and sustain long-term value from their JDA solutions.

 

Consider a typical, in-house IT department which runs and manages hundreds of applications, supports databases, operats systems, third-party applications, vendor software, firewall maintenance, security updates, load balancing, end point configuration- the list is long and tedious. Additionally, if a software patch or upgrade is announced, the internal IT team has to schedule the time to train on and implement the upgrade, which is something they do only once.

 

With JDA Cloud services, all the tasks from infrastructure management to application management are no longer an issue for internal IT. The application performance also has a service level guarantee; something rarely a part of internal IT services. Additionally, consider that most internal IT departments deal with the "first time, only time" challenge, while JDA Cloud Services manages hundreds of JDA application instances, security patches, anti-virus updates, operating system upgrades, and JDA software patches and upgrades.

 

Beyond the application and infrastructure, JDA Cloud Services is unique in its support of its customers business goals. We help customers get the most out of the functionality of their JDA solution by providing Cloud Optimize services. In today's market of limited supply chain talent JDA offers customers support in tuning business processes, generating plans, analyzing results, conferring with internal and external stakeholders, and delivering the business intelligence needed to excel in today's global supply chains.

 

 

CIOL: Why do you say that the Indian market has a huge growth potential as far as SCM on the cloud is concerned?

 

Rajeev Chadha: Cloud-based solution offerings are an acceptable deployment model for Indian companies now, particularly for organisations in the manufacturing, retail and distribution sectors. Supply chain management is becoming a key competitive advantage. The current economic situation in India, and globally, has further accentuated the need for organisations to protect both their top-lines and bottom-lines, and that's where there is a need for organisations to create agile supply chains that respond to the ever changing business needs. Indian enterprises wanting to satisfy a growing demand for new products via new omni-channels, and at a speed not experienced before, will need to deploy state of the art supply chain solutions faster, and ensure these solutions can deliver the high ROI that they need. That's where Cloud-based SCM solutions are increasingly being considered, as they offer complete flexibility and faster payback, without involving capital Expenditure in IT infrastructure or new skills. 

SCM solutions delivered via the cloud also help ‘future-proof' these organisations by bringing the enterprise customer closer to the solution providers, so that both organisations can adapt to the changes in the marketplace. An end-to-end SCM Cloud like JDA Cloud Services can also help customers immediately gain access to all the new product innovations and updates that JDA delivers without going through cycles of technology and product refresh cycles every 5 years. This means the JDA software delivered via the Cloud is an appreciating asset, and keeps the Indian customer current with where the market is headed in future.

 

CIOL: What would the benefits of alternate Cloud solutions be, if those are available?

 

Rajeev Chadha: Cloud is a ubiquitous term in today's marketplace. Cloud can be private, public or hybrid. At JDA we focus on what our customer needs, to make sure their JDA Software solution is always delivering value, today and tomorrow, so that our customer can focus on their business, not software.

 

Often when listening to people discuss Cloud computing they focus on capacity or how you get to or "consume" the Cloud. JDA Cloud Services offers all of these capacity components. However, we take our Cloud Services a step further by adding the concept of capability. What we mean by that is how we increase our customers' capability to reduce risk and improve business agility. This capability is enabled by having JDA experts monitor, manage, support and provide functional business insights from JDA Software applications.

Using traditional terminology we deploy private Cloud, single tenant, dedicated application instance solutions for our customers, however more than a parking space for servers and software, we go further for our customers and offer application performance guarantees and Cloud Optimize services to improve our customers' business results. So, while there are many alternate forms of Cloud solutions, we believe in focusing on helping our customers quickly achieve and sustain ROI on their JDA Software solutions.

 

CIOL: What are the solutions JDA has for Cloud-based SCM solutions for large enterprise and small and mid-sized segments? Elaborate.     

 

Rajeev Chadha: JDA Cloud Services offers solutions for Tier 1 through 3 companies. "Simplified" or "lite" versions of JDA Software solutions are not just for large companies. Consider a large retail organization with 2000 companies around the world. Eighty percent of the sites might only require limited functionality - yet the company is a large Tier 1 customer. JDA Cloud Services offers pre-configured, template-based solutions that allow us to quickly deploy and provision the software for all sizes and segments of the market.