It has been a busy couple of weeks at JDA Software, and with so many companies using JDA in their supply chains, SCDigest thought it would be worth summarizing these recent and consequential moves.

First, interim CEO Bal Dail, who stepped in from his chairman role to replace former CEO Hamish Brewer in May, took on the top executive spot permanently on Oct. 15, after the company searched several months for an outside candidate. This was not at all a surprise, and in fact SCDigest predicted at the time the likelihood of such an outcome when Dail took the interim position. Dail was a partner in private equity firm New Mountain Capital, which in late 2012 engineered a deal in which RedPrairie (which New Mountain owned) merged with the larger and the public company JDA. The combined entities kept the JDA name, but took on RedPrairie's private company status after buying out JDA shareholders.

New Mountain has more than $2 billion invested in the combined companies.

That JDA struggled to find a new outside CEO is not surprising, for several reasons. First, identifying a suitable and experienced CEO for a neatly $1 billion software company is simply not very easy today. Second, suitable candidates may have found the risk/reward equation a bit challenging, as expectations for eventual valuation of JDA are high and the company was hardly broken, though not without its challenges, meaning the upside might have seemed a bit limited versus the potential downside of not meeting financial goals and being replaced.

Third, Brewer was let go for not pursuing JDA's new strategies - developed in late 2013/early 2014 - fast enough, meaning those strategies had really been set in stone, along with a number of organizational changes. New CEOs generally want a free hand to set their own strategies and restructure things according to their preferences, perhaps limiting the appeal of the JDA spot to outsiders.

Bail was very involved in the development of the strategies and the organizational changes. He is also said to be very happy running the company, so in the end it was perhaps inevitable he would move from interim to permanent status. SCDigest has found employees in general feel very positive about Dail.

JDA is Now All About "Plan to Deliver"

The heart of the rebranding announced this week is a new tag line - Plan to Deliver - but the concept goes much deeper than just some new words that go underneath a new logo as well, according to JDA chief marketing officer Kevin Iaquinto.

The old JDA tag line was "The Supply Chain Company," a phrase it picked up when it acquired i2 Technologies a number of years ago.

But Iaquinto told SCDigest that there were several problems with that line, besides maybe the need to refresh the branding as all companies must do every so often. First, he said, while "The Supply Chain Company" might have resonated with JDA's manufacturing customers, it was less appealing to JDA's many retail customers, who think about supply chain a little differently than do manufacturers, and do many things using JDA software that are best are on the periphery of supply chain, such as core merchandise planning.

Second, Iaquinto said the old tag line was too JDA company-centric, versus connoting a more customer-centric mission.

"Plan to Deliver" can be actually seen as covering several dimensions. First, with the RedPrairie merger, it captures the breadth of JDA's current product portfolio, from its traditional planning software to the execution capabilities that the RedPrairie merger brought to the table (as well as other execution pieces JDA already had).

Second, there is the connotation of JDA customers planning for success, that is to "deliver" financial and customer results, and perhaps a bit of a connection as well to the current omni-channel mania and required eFulflillment capabilities.

Third, the line is being used as a sort of rallying cry internally, as a "commitment to delivering results for customers," Iaquinto said. In fact, for example, JDA has been changing some aspects of its compensations plans for top managers that ties them more closely to customer results, satisfaction ratings, and metrics like "net promoter score" (NPS), which basically measures how enthusiastic a company is about a vendor.

There have been other related changes. Last April, at its user conference, JDA announced five new core product solution suites that would be its main go-to-market vehicles, each containing a number of different solution components along with implied process models. Those suites in total encompassed 30 plus different applications, versus the more than 130 products JDA had in total before that, most of which are now being phased out or sold off.

(Supply Chain Trends and Issues Article - Continued Below)