New capabilities from JDA create transportation resiliency

As variability escalates in the transportation function — and the rise of omni-channel selling creates new cost and service pressures — JDA Software Group, Inc. has announced new capabilities in the JDA® Transportation portfolio that help companies make smarter, more strategic shipping and delivery decisions. By balancing internal capacities and constraints with customer promises, this enhanced functionality supports a new level of resiliency and agility that companies need in today's complex business landscape.

JDA Transportation solutions are part of JDA's Intelligent Fulfillment™ software portfolio, which delivers synchronization, constraint awareness and zero latency to enable more profitable fulfillment for both retailers and manufacturers in an omni-channel world.

"In today's omni-channel selling environment, competitive pressures have never been more intense — and customers have never been more demanding," noted Fabrizio Brasca, vice president of solution strategy for Intelligent Fulfillment at JDA Software. "In planning loads and scheduling deliveries, companies want to meet ambitious customer service goals — but, at the same time, they need to recognize and honor real-world execution constraints. They also need to protect their profit margins by making decisions that balance service optimization with cost control."

"The enhancements to the JDA Transportation portfolio in this new release provide companies with exclusive new capabilities that allow them to make more intelligent fulfillment decisions," noted Brasca. "For example, for the first time JDA has introduced a way to dynamically split shipments concurrent to routing to improve load efficiency. Another exclusive capability is using warehouse aware, item definitions to build more exact loads, so that resources are utilized optimally. These are game-changing software functionalities that ensure JDA customers are using every inch of available space, and every minute on the clock, to best advantage."

Key enhancements to the JDA Transportation portfolio center around fixed fleet routing with dynamic insertion, minimizing cost and maximizing service levels in today's high pressure, omni-channel fulfillment environment:

• More granular level of item-awareness during load building. With this JDA-exclusive capability, shippers can apply granular, warehouse aware item definitions to improve load building, decrease costs, and maximize equipment and resource utilization — as well as increase visibility and exception management. Shippers can define item-level details including warehouse locations and constraints, profiles, groupings, packaging hierarchies and loading factors. As a result, loading efficiencies are improved at both shipping origin and all destinations. In addition, lower-level packaging is automatically rolled up into higher-level packaging for more efficient equipment utilization and shipment handling. Load planners can maximize capacity based on the number of stops, loading type and item type — leading to more profitable, more executable loads.

• Dynamic shipment splitting that's concurrent with routing. New functionality, exclusive to JDA, enables companies to strategically split shipments into two or more sub-shipments to improve load efficiency — and this splitting occurs concurrently with routing in a seamless, fluid process. All sub-shipments reference the original shipment for the purpose of tracking. Shipment splitting can be configured at the container level and controlled at the origin and destination locations. Splitting is applicable to both greater-than- truckload and less-than-truckload shipments. Load planners can control the number of times a shipment can be split, as well as the minimum split size, to honor both physical and business constraints.

• Shipment prioritization. A new capability in the JDA Transportation portfolio considers the priority of shipments based on system inputs that are provided by solutions like upstream replenishment planning. This capability enables load planners to differentiate high-priority shipments that must travel immediately from less urgent shipments that can start later in the planning horizon. Shipment prioritization drives resource, dock and throughput optimization — while supporting the consolidation of shipments with similar priorities during the load-building process.

• Enhancements to Integrated fleet management. JDA Transportation functionality allows planners to define "skeleton" routes, with stop sequences and load characteristics that are best to service frequently recurring freight movements. While these routes are predefined, JDA now provides the flexibility to fill any available space in real time as plans change. Capacity can be pre-booked for these shipments, then an optimization process will fill empty stops on these skeleton routes with eligible shipments when they become available. Planners can also pre-book resources such as carrier capacity and dock capacity for forecasted shipments. These new capabilities allow the integration of all available resources, offering both flexibility and maximum cost efficiency.

• Enhancements to Transportation Smartbench. This release also includes new capabilities in Transportation Smartbench, JDA's powerful user interface which provides data for real-time decision-making. In addition to various enhancements related to load building and containerization, additional features include additional primary entities including shipments, trips and skeleton routes and all the relevant functions associated with those entities, including trip rate shopping as well as manual shipment splits.

"According to a recent JDA study, only 16 percent of companies can fulfill omni-channel demand profitably today," said Brasca. "One of the biggest obstacles for both retailers and manufacturers is solving the transportation challenge — how to get products to multiple destinations, across different time frames, in the most profitable manner. The new functionality in the JDA Transportation portfolio is specifically aimed at giving shippers the visibility to make intelligent service/cost trade-offs — as well as the flexibility to fully utilize all their available capacity and other resources. We believe these new capabilities will be a game-changer in mastering profitable omni-channel fulfillment."

JDA Software was recently recognized by Gartner, Inc. as a leader in the 2015 "Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems" research report.^[1] This is the ninth year in a row that JDA and formerly, i2, has appeared in the Leaders quadrant and of the 9 vendors evaluated for this report, JDA was 1 of only 3 vendors featured in the Leaders quadrant.

^[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems, C. Dwight Klappich, Bart De Muynck, March 24, 2015