JDA upgrades transportation software

JDA Software Group Inc. has added a tool to its transportation portfolio that the software developer said will help manufacturers and e-tailers meet ever-tighter delivery deadlines while restraining shipping costs.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based JDA said the upgrade, which became available earlier this week, will allow customers to solve a common transportation challenge of the e-commerce era, namely how to get products to multiple destinations across different time frames in the most profitable manner. "In today's omnichannel selling environment, competitive pressures have never been more intense—and customers have never been more demanding," said Fabrizio Brasca, JDA's vice president of solution strategy for intelligent fulfillment. "The enhancements to the...portfolio in this new release provide companies with exclusive new capabilities that allow them to make more intelligent fulfillment decisions."

JDA's transportation solutions are part of the company's Intelligent Fulfillment software portfolio, an application suite the company said is built to deliver more profitable fulfillment practices by balancing warehouse constraints with shipping deadlines, prioritizing loads by upstream replenishment schedules, and managing fleets according to customizable truck routes.

With the upgraded transportation portfolio of software tools, shippers can balance service demands with cost pressures to fine-tune their strategies in shipping and delivery decisions, JDA said. The software's increased flexibility allows users to make real-time adjustments such as shipment prioritization, dynamic shipment splitting, and building item-aware loads, JDA said.

"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," Brasca said. "They also need to protect their profit margins by making decisions that balance service optimization with cost control."

Retailers and manufacturers can push back against those forces and regain control of their shipping cycle by applying the new capabilities, JDA said.

A recent JDA study found that only 16 percent of companies can profitably meet omnichannel demand, because they can't make intelligent tradeoffs between service and cost. (Read the full study here.)

"As e-commerce transforms into omnichannel fulfillment, retailers are realizing that their existing networks, from distribution center to store, are assets that can be leveraged to service individual customer demand," Brasca wrote in a recent blog post. "To maximize transportation utilization and performance, the notion of 'one store/one delivery' is making way for dynamic order splitting and multiple deliveries as a concurrent part of the store routing problem."

Users can now apply JDA's portfolio to enhance their fixed fleet-routing capabilities through "dynamic insertion," the practice of adding shipments to a route should the situation warrant, the company said. This allows shippers to squeeze extra value from predictable, fixed delivery routes by adopting a strategy of integrating into the load mix shipments that might not otherwise be accommodated, Brasca wrote.