Motorsports Aftermarket Group (MAG), one of the largest “brick and click” retailers in the booming market for motorcycle accessories, faced a time and cost crunch. Today’s business and consumer customers expect a customer experience that provides extensive options, simplifies selection, and delivers quickly.

MAG offers thousands of popular items alongside a wide range of lower-demand, hard-to-find items. The web experience makes shopping and buying appealing and easy. However, order fulfillment was a challenge. In order to serve regional markets the company maintained several regional warehouses, each with extensive inventories. One consequence of that distribution model is that stocking inventory in multiple warehouses is expensive. Furthermore, most customers placed their orders in the evening, after the close of business of the typical retail and shipping operation. Furthermore, some newer competitors deliver orders within two days.

A wave of changing customer expectations and competition were upon MAG. MAG needed to change, and change profitably. By combining their warehouses next to a UPS shipping hub that offers midnight shipping pickups for next day delivery, automating more of their inventory handling with the help of a JD Edwards partner, and using core capabilities in JD Edwards Advanced Warehousing, MAG has shortened their shipping cycle times and reduced order handling costs. Instead of being hit by a wave of change, MAG is riding successfully at the forefront of change.

As Lyle Ekdahl mentioned in his #INFOCUS17 Keynote, companies are facing a “rogue wave” of rapid technology innovation, technology maturation and adoption, and the rapid evolution of digitally-native companies. Helping customers thrive amidst this collision of customer challenges is “The Why” that guides the latest efforts of Oracle’s JD Edwards product development team.

The JD Edwards product team continues to deliver new process and technology capabilities to enable Oracle customers to transform into digitally-native companies. Consequently, customers have the potential to achieve major breakthroughs in business performance.

How do companies transform into digital enterprises? In his Keynote, Lyle focused on three transformation principles that will apply to many organizations:

• Digitize operations: no paper, no manual steps
• Digitize enterprise: digital pattern matching (such as the procure to pay process), automatic exception processing, and agile decision support (such as with UX One’s Alert > Analyze > Act interaction model)
• Digitize your product: digital delivery, digital value chain / supply chain

A tsunami of change is coming. Companies that respond quickly to these changes are poised to successfully ride out the big wave. My next blog post will dive deeper into the details of how Oracle’s JD Edwards team is prioritizing investments that help customers.

Want to learn more? Oracle has put together a variety of educational content assets at www.LearnJDE.com, many of which focus on what is new. To learn more from customers and partners about how to use these new capabilities, visit Quest’s Content Library.