Llamasoft taps JDA executive Razat Gaurav as CEO

Supply chain software firm Llamasoft Inc. said Monday it had tapped JDA Software Inc. executive Razat Gaurav as its new CEO, replacing co-founder and former CEO Don Hicks, who will continue as the chairman of the board.

Fellow co-founder Toby Brzoznowski will continue in the role of chief strategy officer, according to Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Llamasoft. Gaurav had served as executive vice president, general manager, and chief revenue officer at JDA, where he had worked since 2010.

The move comes a year after Llamasoft announced in 2017 it had sold a majority stake of the company to the private equity firm TPG Capital for several hundred million dollars, and planned to use the cash to launch supply chain visibility, planning, and demand modeling solutions. Llamasoft had also sold a minority share of the firm to Goldman, Sachs Group in 2015 for $50 million.

Hiring Gaurav will help Llamasoft to accelerate its product innovation, customer success, and company growth, the company said in a statement. LLamasoft's core product is a platform that allows manufacturers, retailers, and logistics service providers (LSPs) to simulate changes to their operations by using a "digital twin" of their supply chain.

The business environment is evolving at such a fast rate that companies need a tool they can use to quickly model potential changes to any part of their operations, from demand to inventory, sourcing, distribution, manufacturing, retail, and fulfillment, Gaurav said in an interview.

The Llamasoft platform sits on top of a user's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, allowing companies to avoid silos of information in favor of a combined view that includes disparate elements such as the transportation management system (TMS), demand planning, inventory optimization, retail replenishment, and other sectors, Gaurav said.

That unified view of operations is critical because changing any operation in a dynamic supply chain has a ripple effect on other departments, he said. "In the supply chain, you make one change in downstream demand, and it has an impact on upstream supply and—oh, by the way—it also affects warehousing and transportation," said Gaurav.