JDA Software, Inc., today announced its fourth SaaS solution infused with Blue Yonder’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities since completing the acquisition of Blue Yonder last quarter. Luminate Demand Edge extends and enhances JDA’s industry-leading demand planning solutions – as well as other traditional demand planning applications – to deliver game-changing, autonomous forecast accuracy. With true demand sensing capabilities, it leverages leading AI and ML algorithms to develop highly accurate, probabilistic short-term demand forecasts that go beyond traditional forecasting methods to incorporate hundreds of demand factors.
Faced with rising customer expectations and increased competition, there is heightened pressure for companies to respond quickly to market changes or risk sales and profit. Across industries, inventory levels are increasing to counter growing demand volatility. Increased supply chain complexity is also introducing additional costs in the supply chain. Luminate Demand Edge addresses these challenges by enabling a more precise demand forecasting method, so companies can predict demand with greater accuracy, enabling them to improve customer service without adding inventory to the supply chain. Luminate Demand Edge, an application within the JDA® Luminate™ Planning family of next-generation solutions and enhancements, is built on a cognitive, connected SaaS platform that embraces digital edge technologies.
“Luminate Demand Edge improves the customer experience with cognitive ML-based demand sensing capabilities that enable organizations to calculate the true drivers of real-time demand, for the first time,” said Desikan Madhavanur, chief development officer, JDA. “We are once again infusing innovation into our product portfolio –to enhance and extend our applications to deliver the autonomous, self-learning capabilities that will reshape how companies approach their demand planning – and overall supply chain strategy – moving forward.”
Key capabilities within Luminate Demand Edge include:
- An outside-in approach that enhances forecast accuracy: Traditional forecasting approaches have been driven from the inside-out, influenced by desired sales projections and experienced demand planners’ intuition. Luminate Demand Edge takes an outside-in approach, enabling organizations to accurately incorporate hundreds of internal and external, environmental variables to calculate the true drivers of real-time demand.
- Probabilistic demand predictions and insights drive better business results: Instead of managing a demand forecast that produces a single-number forecast, Luminate Demand Edge looks at hundreds of external factors and then calculates a probabilistic demand forecast. Understanding the likelihood of different demand outcomes, each with a calculated business impact and risk, arms demand planners with the data and insights they need to make more informed, risk-aware business decisions.
- ML-driven insights deliver faster, more profitable business decisions: Analyzing real-time data dramatically increases the volume of data beyond human capacity.To analyze big data sets and examine every possible outcome, companies need the processing scale and precision that only ML can provide. Luminate Demand Edge enables the highest degree of automation, processing hundreds of internal and external signals and billions of data points to arrive at unbiased predictions that lead to more profitable business decisions. Further, leveraging ML yields continuous learning that drives ever increasing understanding and accuracy of demand.Not only does this improve demand planners’ productivity, but it also increases forecast accuracy, enabling companies to deliver a superior customer experience.
“Luminate Demand Edge revolutionizes demand management and will give customers nearly immediate value across all levels of the organization. It will ingest large volumes of big data and will, through its differentiated scalability, provide JDA customers the ability to drive revenue and profits while reducing out-of-stock rates by up to 30 percent, helping realize forecast accuracy levels of up to 95 percent, improving planner productivity by up to 70 percent, and delivering rapid ROI in as little as six months,” concluded Madhavanur.