JDA Category Management Empower Customers to Run at the Speed of Retail

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New Innovative Capabilities within the JDA Category Management 2017.1 enhancements increase collaboration between retailers and manufacturers to deliver a more fluid, responsive category management plan in line with consumer expectations

With the digital supply chain transformation underway, retailers have an opportunity to reinvent their strategies from the consumer perspective to best address shopper expectations. This is particularly pertinent from within the store, on the floor and on the shelf, where retailers have the biggest opportunity to impact consumer purchase decisions immediately. Additionally, there is ongoing pressure for retailers to profitably satisfy customer demand and differentiate their brand to remain competitive.

In response to these market demands, JDA Software Group, Inc. has introduced new capabilities within JDA® Category Management, that increase the collaboration capabilities between category managers and store managers as well as with manufacturers, and enhanced capabilities that give retailers the ability to thrive in this rapidly evolving market.

“In today’s customer-centric retail environment, getting merchandise assortments right the first time is crucial to shopper satisfaction as well as profitability. Given this, we have enhanced several components within JDA Category Management to move JDA further towards the goal of providing an ‘always on’ category management platform that runs at the speed of retail,” said Todd McCourtie, Senior Director, Solutions Strategy, JDA. “We have simplified many aspects of the assortment and space optimization processes to empower category managers to not only create customer-centric planograms, but to also unite retailers and manufacturers together in the planning process for more granular, localized assortments every time.”

In today's global economy, customers are demanding a more relevant, seamless and personalized shopping experience. Shopper behaviors, wants and needs are shifting faster than category managers can respond. With this in mind, JDA Category Management now enables a more agile, proactive planning process that can take into account shifting market dynamics and refine plans on the fly.


Key enhancements include:
Improved assortment collaboration: Via JDA Open Access, retailers can collaborate with internal stakeholders or trading partners via a web interface to review scorecard measures when creating assortments. Stores can review and provide feedback to proposed assortment plans to better align merchandise with local preferences and demand.

Consistent user interface: Taking into account direct customer input, JDA has redesigned its user interface (UI) across JDA Category Management to provide a more consistent user experience. The UI refresh provides a modern user experience with optimized usability. The Open Access Mobile application has been restyled to deliver a modern look and feel with enhanced intuitive navigation.

Localized space plans and what-if scenario planning: Space planners can now analyze the outcome of their merchandising rules for localized space plans before they run them. This allows for proactive what-if scenario planning which alerts planners to errors or warnings before the space plans are generated. This enables more successful, profitable merchandise plans with less user interaction.

“With this release, we continue toward our vision of empowering retailers and manufacturers to create localized assortment and space plans, and new capabilities that help them sense and respond to in-store expectations proactively,” continued McCourtie. “The future of category management lies within the ability to foster real-time collaboration both internally between store and category managers, and externally, with suppliers and manufacturing partners, to deliver a more fluid, responsive category management plan that falls in line with consumer expectations.”

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