JDA Software plans to grow retail ops in India

JDA Software, the $1-billion revenue American enterprise software applications major, is planning to increase its customer base in India, even as it goes about developing a host of technologies and software at its Global Centre of Excellence (CoE) here.

The company provides end-to-end solutions to as many as 81 of the top 100 retail companies and 79 manufacturing companies’ sub-verticals worldwide. In India, JDA software has around 35-40 major (retail and manufacturing) customers, which it aims to increase by 20-30 more customers in the next couple of years.

“The idea is to provide software for the entire set of back-end operations for retailers to grow; providing them details about stocks, inventories, and many other retail supply chain related content (supply chain planning to execution),” JDA Software India Managing Director Salil Joshi told Deccan Herald on Tuesday.

There are scores of functions that retailers need to contend with, from merchandising, floor planning, sale planning, assortment, and planogramming to allocation, and the biggest challenge is to bring them all together seamlessly on a single platform.

One of the solutions that JDA is involved in is ‘omni-channel retail’, which is a platform that brings all these elements together.

“Unlike eCommerce firms, when it comes to mainstream retailing, sellers look at multiple retail formats, and it has often been seen that online inventory is separate from that at the store. Hence, multi-channel retailing provides different experiences. It’s not optimised and very arbitrary,” Joshi said, adding that an omni-channel retail software fixes just that.

“Irrespective of demand, the same rich experience is guaranteed along with standard pricing, service level agreement (SLA), i.e. predictability of getting the right product at the right time. The omni-channel retail software that we are developing will bring back-end supply chain under one framework,” he said.

As of today, the company has delivered individual pieces of the whole software, and iteratively, in the next two years, a single seamless solutions suite will be delivered.
Most of the company’s software activities happen in India, at the CoE spread across Bengaluru and Hyderabad, working towards product development, consulting, cloud product support and IT, which also helps the company generate revenues.

The 2,200 associates (1,200 in Bengaluru and 1,000 in Hyderabad) will also be hiked in the coming years. Over 50 per cent of JDA’s headcount is based in CoEs in India, Poland, and the upcoming one in Mexico.

“Currently, the India CoE is involved in value addition of our existing products. In terms of product development, around 70 per cent of IP creation comes out of here, apart from the 85-90 per cent in cloud operations. India is providing the differentiator,” Joshi said.