JDA Software and Panasonic Corporation are setting up a joint venture company to develop joint solutions in manufacturing, logistics, and retail.
By combining JDA's SaaS software portfolio in supply chain management with Panasonic's sensing technologies and edge devices, the partners said they will be creating new technologies for businesses.
Alex Price, Group Vice President, JDA, said in a video interview at the sidelines of the NRF Big Show in the United States in January 2019, that the companies have started developing and integrating solutions such as visual sort assist, flowline analytics, and facial recognition.
Visual sort assist, he said, is about being able to calculate “in the warehouse where we are in our sorting, picking, and fulfilment plans for our customers.”
Don Guelich, Director of Planning, Innovation Center, Panasonic Corporation, explained in the same video that the companies have started integrating JDA's Luminate Warehousing Management System with Panasonic Visual Sort Assist.
“Panasonic is very strong with video analytics and using object recognition to detect those packages in combination with our project mapping technologies, we're able to project that decision information directly onto the packages as they're moving down the conveyor belt,” he said.
Another technology that the partners have been working on is adding a layer of facial recognition in the warehouse.
“And so now we can really start to understand what the proper mix is for proper operations of the warehouse between forklift vehicles and employees, for example,” Price said.
The new company headquartered in Tokyo will commence operations in October 2019 subject to regulatory approval.
“The autonomous supply chain transformation is just beginning and it will be built on correlating edge technologies with enterprise supply chain software,” said Girish Rishi, chief executive officer (CEO), JDA. “The JDA partnership with Panasonic to co-innovate and deliver solutions to our customers is a major step in that direction.”
