Supply Chain Brain

to the store, the store scans the receipt and a list pops up on the screen showing which items off that receipt are eligible for return. It gives the store associate all the information needed, so all the associate has to do is scan the receipt and select the item the customer is returning. The JDA solution also keeps track of what has been returned against that receipt—and here is where fraud can come in. Say someone paid for one item and stole another of the same item. They might be able to return both items using the receipt of the item they paid for. Now, if a customer only purchased one, once that item has been returned and the receipt scanned, the system will alert the store if that receipt is scanned again and let them know that item is not eligible for return. This has really improved the accuracy of our returns.

This system is delivered over the inter-
net via a Virtual Private Network so it is all
real-time data movement between the
stores and the central server, which means
there is very little time lag. If we had stores
that were close enough, and in some cases
we do, a customer could buy something at
one store and as fast as he could drive to the
second store to return it, it would already
be in the centralized return data base. There
is no upload and download timing and it is
across all of the stores.
and feel that we wanted.
Another factor was that we had a pre-
existing relationship with JDA that had
been very successful. We use JDA on the
back end, so all the information from the
POS flows into a JDA host system. We were
comfortable with the host system and confi-
dent that JDA would help us work through
any integration issues. Integration really is

SUPPLYCHAINBRAIN EXCLUSIVE

Finally, we knew from working with JDA in the past that they had very strong retail knowledge. It’s not just about software knowledge. We looked at one other really good software company but their retail systems were a little clunky because they didn’t put the retail thought process first and they didn’t seem to think through what the retailer was going to use the system for. So those were the things that tipped the scale towards JDA—our background with them, their understanding of retail and the belief that we would have an easier integration.

Q: Did you look at several vendors before
deciding on JDA?
Christian: Yes, we looked at all the
big vendors, including our prior provider.
They basically all had solutions that met our
criteria, but we really liked the easily cus-
tomizable user interface with JDA. This
meant that I could customize the applica-
tion without having to pay JDA for custom
modifications. This helped us a lot when it
came to training, because we made the
look and feel of the new system very similar
to the POS we were using before, so there
was less of a process impact on the stores.
We were able to control how a transaction
progresses and the order in which things
were entered. The JDA interface is very
flexible in letting you move these things
around. So, for example, if our associates
were accustomed to having the transaction
number be the first thing they entered on a
return, I was able to replace that with the
barcode prompt for the receipt. It was
important to us to be able to customize
things like that so we could give it the look

We look at two levels
of sales reporting
[and we] run an
automated replenish-
ment using the infor-
mation from POS.

Q: Do you use the POS system for other types of inventory control? Christian: Absolutely. We look at two levels of sales reporting at corporate, using data that comes from POS to the JDA host. We look daily at chain level performance, because we have daily goals. My goal today might be $250,000 in sales and we evaluate that performance and report on it every morning at 3:00 a.m. as soon as we get data from all the stores and close out the day. On a weekly basis, we evaluate style selling with the same data that came from the stores using various reports that come off the JDA system. We also run an automated replenishment process using the information from POS. We may set a parameter that says a store should always have three pieces of this item. We evaluate that weekly and if a store sold one during the past week, that triggers an automatic pick for the store.

the trick with POS implementation because POS really is an extension of whatever host supply chain system you are using. POS is the source of all of the data and if the source of the data doesn’t talk well to that back end, you have a problem. We actually had experienced that with our old POS provider, and by adding JDA to the front end as well as the back end we believed that we would have fewer of those issues, and that has turned out to be true.

Q: Are there any lessons you learned from this project you would care to share with our readers?

Christian: In this project, the integration, which we chose to do without JDA resources, proved to be more complex than we thought it would be. We got training from JDA and thought we would be able to integrate it ourselves with our own developers. In hindsight, that was not the best decision because it was a much longer road to where we wanted to be than it would have been if we had gone to JDA and gotten their help.