SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore had the chance last week to do a phone interview with interim JDA Software CEO Bal Dail, who replaced long-time CEO Hamish Brewer in May over concerns that company wasn't moving fast enough relative to a new strategic plan.

Bail is a partner at New Mountain Capital, a private equity company that now owns JDA after orchestrating a merger in late 2012 between JDA and RedPrairie, which New Mountain controlled at the time of the deal.

Bail and a few key executives spent nearly an hour on the phone responding to Gilmore's questions.

Below is a modestly abridged version of the first half of that discussion, which covered a lot of ground.

Due to space reasons, we'll publish the second half of the interview next week. If you want to know where JDA is headed, you will certainly be interested in this discussion.

Gilmore: You went through a major strategic exercise at the end of 2013. We come into 2014, a few months into the year you decide you aren't moving fast enough with executing against those strategies, and you make a change at the top - a very serious move. To what extent should we think of all this as you are building a "new JDA?"

Dail: I think it really is a new JDA. At the end of 2013, we got senior leadership together, and we mapped out what the strategy should look like over the next 5 to 10 years.

So what's new? We really reorganized our go-to-market model and how we service customers, frankly based on what we heard from them through Voice of the Customer surveys. So what we've done is made it easier for customers to interact with JDA, because candidly in the past there was some confusion by customers about who was on point for JDA and championing that customer within the company.

Second we aligned around five integrated solution suites, and that was done to increase the value of JDA and what JDA does for the customer. When you had 130 products, which we did, that's just a lot, and we decided there is just really a core set of products we need to focus on. We found we were working on stuff that was outside really of the supply chain space, for example.

So we picked the products we really wanted to focus on, and organized them into five integrated solution suites.

We also see some short term opportunities in a few specific areas. One of them is in one of the solution suites, what we call "distribution-centric" supply chains, another in a solution we call Flowcasting, and also in the third-party logistics sector.

So consider the distribution-centric supply chain suite. We think that's a huge opportunity because we would be the first to market with an integrated planning and execution solution. And that is where the synergy is in the merger with RedPrairie, as we can now offer planning and execution.

Flowcasting is another major opportunity. When we merged with RedPrairie we inherited part of the Flowcasting solution. Now we own all of it. We think Flowcasting will really change the way manufacturers and retailers will work with each other. We think it will lead companies to go past just investing in the sort of modestly successful CPFR model to something that's much more strategic across enterprises.

Beyond that, we're continuing to invest in what we call the "2.0" versions of the distribution-centric supply chain suite and our retail planning solutions.

We are also continuing to invest in the Cloud. Before it was more just around managed services. Now it will be more SaaS-based, and more dynamic.

In summary, we are evolving significantly from where the company was last year.

Gilmore: Put yourself in the customer's shoes. How is he or she going to perceive this is as a new JDA?

Dail: First, when I have spoken to the customers about the new strategies, they have really resonated with them.

Beyond that, this notion that you will have one customer executive who oversees the entire customer relationship, supported by people across JDA - experts in the solution suites, folks in our services organization, our Cloud group, people in product development - that customer executive can access our entire organization to serve the customer. But the customer will see that one customer executive as the sort of quarterback for everything, and that will be a rather major change in how JDA has historically operated.

We used to have multiple people pinging the customer all the time, and the customer was never quite sure who was on point for what.

Now, all that is a work in progress, because we are still rolling it out, but the customers will definitely see a difference.

I think customers will also see and appreciate the solution suite approach. We spend north of $140 million on R&D, but when you're investing peanut butter style across 130 products, that's probably not delivering the most value to the customer, as opposed to focusing the investment in a smaller set of products across five solution suites. Customers will notice that.

(Supply Chain Trends and Issues Article - Continued Below)