JustEnough Software—Becoming a Retail Planning Stalwart · Demand Forecasting—Automates the production of demand ... Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite ... JustEnough Software—Becoming

VENDOR NOTE.

JUSTENOUGH SOFTWAREBECOMING A RETAIL PLANNING STALWART

By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal Analystwww.technologyevaluation.com

Technology Evaluation Centers

JustEnough Software—Becoming a Retail Planning Stalwart www.technologyevaluation.com 2

JustEnough Software—Becoming a Retail Planning Stalwart

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):


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.


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.


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


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


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:

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 end-

to-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.


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.


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.

http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/article/Whats-Microsofts-Retail-Play.html

http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/article/Mr-Price-Selects-JustEnough-Software.html


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JustEnough Software—Becoming a Retail Planning Stalwart · Demand Forecasting—Automates the production of demand ... Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite ... JustEnough Software—Becoming