JustEnough Software—Becoming a Retail Planning Stalwart

Transcription

Technology
Evaluation Centers
VENDOR NOTE
.
JUSTENOUGH SOFTWARE
BECOMING A RETAIL PLANNING STALWART
By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal Analyst
www.technologyevaluation.com
JustEnough Software was founded in 1994, with a focus on service-level
improvement through the application of statistical forecasting techniques to
determine future demand and to analyze demand and supply variability.
Acquired by FrontRange Solutions in 1998, the software was re-coded using the
Microsoft technology stack and was built for scalability. Subsequently acquired in
2001 by CodeCapital, a private equity fund, JustEnough has continued to prosper
and grow worldwide in the demand management space, providing solutions for
retail, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer businesses. It reportedly remains a
highly profitable, privately held company.
JustEnough helps its customers to forecast their customer demand; plan their
assortments, allocations, and inventory; shape their demand with markdowns and
promotions; and then execute on those plans. As a result, retailers are able to
stock the right merchandise in the right locations, driving customer service and
revenue (return on working capital investment) through improved availability.
JustEnough Retail Planning Suite
JustEnough’s entire solution suite has been organically grown, rather than
through acquisitions like many of the vendor’s competitors have done.
The vendor believes this approach gives it a major advantage of offering an
end-to-end suite of planning solutions that share one common architecture,
database, and user interface (UI). While other vendors have to integrate between
the modules within their own solution suites, JustEnough does not require that
additional level of complexity, which can impact user experience and performance.
The vendor had initially embedded Forecast Pro’s logic into the application, which
uses proprietary multithreaded capabilities that allow thousands of forecasts to
run in parallel to achieve the scale needed for retail. In 2006, JustEnough decided
to replace ForecastPro with its own multithreaded and highly scalable, internally
developed forecast engine. ForecastPro was too much of a “black box” for
JustEnough’s customers and JustEnough wanted the flexibility to add algorithms
and control to its own engine.
The vendor is serving the planning needs of many leading brands including Levi’s,
Abercrombie & Fitch, Lands’ End, Sephora, Movado, The TJX Companies, Mr Price,
and Teavana (owned by Starbucks). JustEnough’s main product line is a Demand
Management solution suite that encompasses the following modules (also see
figures 1–5):
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
Merchandise Financial Planning—Automates the entire merchandise
planning process from planning new locations to creating open-to-buy
budgets.

Assortment Planning—Automates the assortment planning process,
including store clustering, localizing assortments, range planning, size
and color curves, and space allocation planning.

Clustering & Profiling—Enables better decision making through data
modeling, including creating store clusters and product demand profiles.

Allocation—Determines optimal, demand-based allocations, improves
order accuracy, and ensures products get to the stores where they have
the best chance of selling.

Demand Forecasting—Automates the production of demand forecasts,
accommodating everything from erratic products to seasonal variations
and trends to promotional uplift and lost sales.

Inventory Planning & Replenishment—Ensures the right amount of
product is in the right place at the right time using inventory policies,
ABC classifications, and service-level targets.

Promotion Management—Plans successful future campaigns, events,
and promotions, and incorporates their impact into the overall retail
planning process and analyzes their effectiveness.

Social & Mobile Marketing—Delivers promotions to customers using
mobile and social media channels and engages them in new and effective
ways using a private social commerce platform.

Price & Markdown Planning—Enables planners to set multiple price and
markdown structures with complete visibility into inventory, revenue,
and margin impacts.
Figure 1: JustEnough Solution Footprint
Figure 2: JustEnough Merchandise Financial Planning—Flexible Planning
Grid. JustEnough offers an intuitive, strategic view of the financial plan and product
hierarchy, complete with configurable metrics and units of measure along with
drill-down capabilities and the ability to adjust plans at any level.
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Figure 3: JustEnough Assortment Planning—Assortment Selection. The process of
assortment selection combines the planners’ knowledge of the business with the
JustEnough profiling engine to drive out a “smart start” sales, revenue, margin,
and buy plan for each product.
Figure 4: JustEnough Assortment Planning—In-Season Item Plan/WSSI. In-season
planning enables planners to review plan versus actual performance in a weekly sales
and stock intake view in order to measure the extent to which the plan can be achieved
based on the projected stock sell through.
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Figure 5: JustEnough Demand Forecasting—Group Forecasting. Groups may be built and
the items forecasted together in order to obtain a much more practical forecast which
can be used to drive inventory planning decisions.
Recent Developments and Future Roadmap
JustEnough’s strategy has been and will remain focused on providing leading-edge,
end-to-end planning solutions for retail, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer
businesses. The company continues to expand geographically and to rapidly
innovate and enhance both the breadth and depth of its solution suite. Today,
JustEnough is headquartered in Irvine, California, with additional offices in North
Carolina, London, Singapore, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. It has customers
worldwide, which are supported from these offices and by local resources and
partners. JustEnough has a team of industry and technology experts that numbers
more than 100 and that it continues to expand to keep up with the growing
demand for its solutions.
One example of JustEnough supporting international deployments is one client
planning operations in 12 different currencies using a single instance of the
JustEnough system. The solution includes a currency conversion table that allows
for plans to be viewed in any currency, and certain processes allow for multiple
currencies to be displayed on the same screen. In addition, JustEnough supports
multiple languages through its language utility. This provides for any module to be
translated and for translations to be stored in the database and be user specific,
allowing each user to work in his/her preferred language. JustEnough has found
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English to be the preferred language in most markets for this type of advanced
planning solution. The solution has been translated into Italian, with additional
translations to be added based on customer demand.
An example of JustEnough’s continued innovation is the promotion management
offering it brought to market in 2013. The vendor recognized a need in the
market for a robust promotion management offering that could support the
needs of merchandising, marketing, and advertising teams and enable the entire
end-to-end promotion planning, execution, and analysis process. With the
economic downturn, of the not-too-distant past, having made consumers more
promotions driven than ever before and current offerings not being up to meeting
the challenges of managing promotions across multiple retail channels and new
promotion delivery channels (including mobile and social), JustEnough has seized
the opportunity to add an innovative new solution to its end-to-end solution.
While JustEnough has always considered promotions in the demand forecasting
process, what it introduced in 2013 was an end-to-end promotion management
capability and the complementary offerings. The vendor has lately hired quite a
few ex Connect3 Systems and DemandTec (both now part of IBM) team members
to bring lots of expertise in-house to develop this solution. GSK is live on it in
South Africa and it is being implemented at ShopKo now; the vendor also has a
number of deals near closing. The paucity of solutions in this area creates a huge
opportunity for the vendor to take the reins.
One of the strengths of JustEnough’s strategy and solution is that it is enterprise
resource planning (ERP) agnostic. There are customers running Microsoft
Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, homegrown, legacy ERP, and others. Three
years ago, JustEnough expanded its partnership with Microsoft and became a
Microsoft Dynamics Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner. Since then, the
partnership has deepened and in March of 2014, the vendor announced entering
into a Global ISV partner agreement with Microsoft Dynamics. JustEnough was
chosen as a result of the unique value proposition that it provides in the Microsoft
Dynamics retail ecosystem. It also partners with Microsoft Dynamics value-added
resellers (VARs) worldwide. In addition, JustEnough partners and works with
leading system integrators (SIs) outside of the Dynamics ecosystem.
JustEnough CEO Tells More
Malcolm Buxton is JustEnough’s president and chief executive officer (CEO), and
under his leadership the vendor has brought together a new-generation
technology set that solves the analytical, planning, and execution challenges of
today’s retail and consumer products markets. Buxton brings more than 30 years
of experience transforming businesses using technology. In executive leadership
roles at Gemini Consulting and PriceWaterhouse, he has worked with Fortune
500 companies such as IBM, SABMiller, and Holiday Inn on all aspects of business
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strategy and operational transformation. Buxton was also chief operating officer
(CFO) at Ixchange Technology Holdings, which was later rebranded as FrontRange
Solutions.
TEC: What has been a door-opening product, and what has been selling best of
late?
MB: Recently we have found our Merchandise Financial Planning, or MFP, and
Assortment Planning, or AP, modules to be opening lots of doors. These are areas
where many retailers are investing in moving beyond Excel spreadsheets and
homegrown systems. In the end, we find our products being adopted in one or
two ways. Some companies start with MFP and AP and later move to demand
forecasting, inventory planning, allocation, and replenishment. Others choose to
start with forecasting, inventory planning, replenishment, and maybe allocation,
and later tackle MFP and AP. It’s really about where the pain points are for each
customer and where they can get the fastest results and return on investment.
TEC: What is your secret sauce (that others cannot emulate easily)?
MB: Our secret sauce has many ingredients, such as follows:
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
We have a strong focus on user experience and ease of use. Our interface
uses Excel-like grids and graphical displays, which drive quick user
adoption. Some customers particularly like the ability to define and
configure, without changes to code, metrics specific to their planning
approach.

Our solution suite has been organically grown and the modules share
one common architecture, database, and user interface. Our largest
competitors have assembled solutions through acquisitions and,
therefore, will most likely never reach the end state of a complete endto-end solution sharing a common architecture.

Our solution is modular so customers can start by taking on the module
or modules needed to address their largest opportunities and challenges
first, and easily add additional modules later. It’s as easy as turning a
switch.

The solution enables management by exception supported by
sophisticated algorithms, dashboards, stoplights, and alerts. Exceptions
can be identified through a filter wizard, and all this can dramatically
improve planner productivity.

We offer both OnSite and OnCloud platforms, providing flexible
deployment options. We can integrate with any ERP system, versus being
married to one. The architecture is highly scalable being Microsoft .NET
and SQL Server based.
TEC: What is your ideal customer profile?
MB: While we can help any type of retailer or wholesaler, we find that those in
apparel and footwear, fast fashion, specialty hard and soft, general merchandise,
mass merchants, department, and drug are an especially good fit for our solutions.
We work well with tier one and two businesses given the size and complexity of
their planning processes. We support multichannel planning and have customers
using our solution to plan everything from one channel to multiple channels.
Companies that are innovators and seeking a partner that can quickly innovate
with them often turn to JustEnough.
TEC: Who are your main competitors, and what is typically the reason that you
sometimes lose to those competitors?
MB: Our competitors fall into two categories—very large vendors, such as Oracle,
Epicor, and JDA Software, and then smaller point players, such as TXT Maple Lake
and 7thonline. Overall, we have a very high win rate. We sometimes lose to larger
competitors when a prospect has a predisposition to that vendor’s technology
platform or prefers to work with a very large vendor. We sometimes lose to
smaller players based on price, but rarely on functionality or ease of use.
TEC: Incidentally, what are the evident remaining white spaces (functionality gaps)
in your suite and how do you plan to fill them?
MB: We see a number of white spaces that we are addressing in our roadmap,
such as follows:

Planogramming, which is becoming far more integrated with assortment
planning delivering on “space-aware assortments” and moving to a
requirement for today’s retailers versus a nice-to-have add-on.

Advanced analytics, including store clustering and customer and product
profiling.

Big data analytics, which feeds into areas including price and revenue
optimization.
TEC: Do you think that demand management can remain as a viable stand-alone
software market/category?
MB: Yes, we firmly believe that retail planning and demand planning are and will
remain very viable software markets/categories. These applications are mission
critical in meeting sales and margin objectives, minimizing capital investment in
inventory and satisfying customer demand. The large ERP vendors have not
proven that they can or will ever deliver leading-edge, robust planning solutions
as part of their execution and financial focused systems. Demand and retail
planning solutions are complex and specialized applications, which are best
delivered by very focused and experienced vendors. However, we are finding that
the boundaries are not as fixed as in the past due to the increasing number of
integrated touch points.
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TEC: Have you seen any recent changes in buyers/users adoption and buying
attitudes? In other words, who are your advocates and decision makers at
prospective customers?
MB: We have seen an increasing acceleration in the number of retailers that are
realizing that Excel-based planning processes will not enable them to survive and
strive in today’s multichannel, hyper-competitive retail environment. Excel
worked OK in the past before the explosion of data required to plan multiple
channels and right down to the store and store-keeping unit, or SKU, level. We
have also seen acceleration in the adoption of cloud-based solutions. We find that
our advocates and decision makers tend to be in the line of business and that IT is
often involved more as a gatekeeper for technology purposes. This trend toward
power shifting to line of business, or LoB, from IT is accelerating in line with the
adoption of cloud-based solutions.
TEC: What is your growth strategy in terms of geography, verticals, etc.?
MB: Our top three geographic focus areas are: 1. North America, 2. Europe and 3.
Asia Pacific, or APAC, in that order. We are very active in all three of these
geographies and pursue opportunities in others on a more opportunistic basis.
We don’t see the focus changing, but do see us taking more market share in all
three. Our vertical focus will remain on retail, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer
businesses. We believe this focus provides us a competitive advantage over other
vendors that try to serve the needs of too many disparate verticals.
TEC: Are multitenant cloud deployments and mobility capabilities the
requirement for your target market and what are you doing in that regard?
MB: As mentioned earlier, our solution is available OnSite and OnCloud. We are
finding the demand for the OnCloud platform accelerating. Given we have been
supporting OnCloud for over five years, JustEnough was ahead of the curve and
well positioned to take advantage of this growing demand. We do not see
mobility as a requirement for planning solutions, but do see mobile as a
requirement for delivering promotional offers to consumers and, as such, have a
module in our footprint, which does just that.
TEC: Can you cater to both retailers and their suppliers (consumer goods
manufacturers)?
MB: Yes, we can cater to the needs of both retailers and their suppliers. We have
quite a few of the later in our customer base. We have already covered what we
offer for the retail side in detail. For suppliers we offer demand forecasting,
inventory planning, and replenishment. We also find in today’s collaborative
environment that some suppliers are taking on or assisting with parts of the retail
planning. For example, category captains and vendor-assisted inventory.
Therefore, some suppliers are interested and can benefit from our more retail
focused solutions.
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TEC: Is there anything you are at liberty to volunteer on the company's future
moves?
MB: We look at the future in three time horizons. At a high level, here is what we
have planned:

1 to 2 years—Planogramming, analytics, and big data.

3 to 5 years—Rapid price management and a continued focus on big data.

5 to 10 years—As a business, we run a technology watch and talk to
analysts and industry experts on an ongoing basis to see what trends are
emerging. We don’t lock the business in too tightly so we can quickly
react as new trends emerge.
Related Reading
What’s Microsoft’s Retail Play? February 20, 2012.
Mr Price Selects JustEnough Software. June 28. 2013.
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JustEnough Software—Becoming a Retail Planning Stalwart

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