JDA Software Group, Inc., a provider of supply chain management, merchandising, and pricing solutions based in Scottsdale, Ariz., has announced the release of the JDA Supply Chain Strategist 6.3.4, a network design and optimization solution that provides strategic, end-to-end capabilities to evaluate, design, optimize, and transform supply chain networks. The new release, a part of JDA’s ongoing commitment to product evolution and innovation, is a direct result of feedback gained through its user enhancement voting process.

Continuing Innovation
The Supply Chain Strategist will deliver a modeling and optimization environment that will be capable of representing the breadth and depth of the supply chain required to answer the strategic questions confronting companies every day.

With the new Network Inventory Modeling capability, customers can understand and project the inventory costs of various network design decisions. As a result, customers no longer need to use “rule-of-thumb” analysis to understand the inventory — and thus financial —impact of network design decisions.

The new functionality provides an accurate and scientific way of analyzing inventory costs and parameters based on stochastic inputs, while using algorithms that have been proven over the last decade as a part of JDA’s Inventory Optimization solution. This incorporation of new Inventory Analysis capabilities within the JDA Supply Chain Strategist offers customers a more comprehensive and holistic strategic analysis tool to help validate network design decisions when faced with real-world uncertainties.

Companies in many diverse industries already use JDA Supply Chain Strategist to make strategic supply chain decisions around procurement, manufacturing, distribution, and transportation, as well as mergers and acquisitions.

For example, HeidelbergCement AG operates a complex, geographically dispersed supply chain that serves the global building materials marketplace. By using the Supply Chain Strategist to model supply, demand, and capacity across this sophisticated network, HeidelbergCement makes intelligent decisions that match shifting customer demand with available regional capacity.

Therefore, the company analyzes decisions such as the construction of new plants, acquisitions, and other investments in a more strategic manner – including consideration of whether or not the selected routes are the most profitable ones to satisfy changing customer demand.

“With JDA Supply Chain Strategist, we can basically make much more informed decisions. It gives us much better insight into the behavior of our supply network, and enables us to allocate real values to different investment options,” said Henrik Lenart, strategy analyst, logistics, HeidelbergCement. “We believe enhancing the solution to include inventory considerations will help deliver even greater value when making strategic supply chain decisions that can make a tremendous impact on our business.”