Arthur Acquisition

History

JDA acquired Arthur Retail, the market leader in strategic merchandise management software applications, in June of 1998 from Comshare Inc., a leading supplier of financial analytic applications for management planning and control. Acquiring Arthur was a key step in JDA’s growth strategy and represented an aggressive move to further JDA’s position as the leading global provider for the retail industry.

By expanding JDA’s retail offering with the Arthur Enterprise Suite, JDA positioned itself to better help customers proactively manage their businesses and find additional ways to optimize their revenue sources. Leading solutions such as Arthur Planning, Arthur Assortment Planning, Arthur Allocation and Arthur Performance Analysis have helped customers thrive and provided JDA a solid basis for further innovation.

In addition to expanding the JDA product line with new, strategic functionality, the company gained retail giants — including American Eagle Outfitters, Nike, Inc., Kohl’s Corporation, Famous Footwear and Casual Male Retail Group, Inc. — in more than 30 countries, reinforcing JDA’s position as the largest retail merchandising and supply chain vendor in the world.

Commitment to Innovation

Through continued aggressive development of key functional and technical enhancements, these innovative planning, assortment planning, allocation and performance analysis solutions continue to deliver increased value for JDA’s customers. As part of the strategic, workflow-driven enterprise planning solution suite, JDA enables retailers to effectively plan and execute unique store-level assortments that match local consumer demand, as well as create consumer-centric plans based on product attributes such as theme, collection, floor-set plans or promotions. The solution enables retailers to dynamically group store locations into clusters based on calculated data, such as size and type of store, volume of merchandise sold and customer attributes.

JDA’s fully automated solution saves retailers valuable time and eliminates manual errors by applying user-defined calculations to generate intelligent assortment quantities based on factors such as space, rate of sale and initial distribution. Furthermore, this fully integrated, end-to-end solution ensures visibility of assortment plans throughout the organization, ensuring that plans are aligned with corporate objectives.

By connecting all phases of the planning process, JDA positions retailers to adapt easily to market fluctuations and to increase profit margins and sales. Additionally, JDA Channel Clustering allows stores to be grouped together based on customer preferences, which then can be translated into actionable decision making.