Continuing the momentum from its U.S. customer conference, Blue Yonder, a leading digital supply chain and omni-channel commerce fulfillment provider, further unleashed its innovation shockwave at ICON London last week.
Product Innovations:
- 165 billion: Monthly AI predictions being delivered by the Blue Yonder Luminate® Platform
- 70+: Warehouse management customers who have adopted the Blue Yonder data cloud
- 42%: Year-over-year increase in patents filed, resulting in a new patent every three days on average
“The era of point solutions is over. The era of rigid, monolithic applications is over. You can no longer just dip your toe in AI as a test or experiment. The proliferation of the cloud has paved the way for an interoperable suite of composable microservices on one common supply chain platform that embraces both predictive and generative AI and can scale using the power of the internet as an infinite supercomputer,” said Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder. “This can be attributed to recent advances in technology including generative AI and infinite computing, as well as our expanded partnerships with Accenture and Snowflake, which were announced earlier this year. Blue Yonder is truly building the supply chain operating system for the world.”
Blue Yonder plans to release its largest product update in the history of the company in December 2023. It will include the first set of interoperable solutions across planning, warehouse, transportation, and commerce. This is made possible thanks to the progress the company has made on the technology and capabilities it announced in May at its ICON Las Vegas event. These new capabilities are powered by groundbreaking technologies that improve business performance and customer experience such as:
- A Common Supply Chain Platform Across Planning and Execution. Blue Yonder connects the breadth of its portfolio from supply chain planning and category management to commerce, warehousing, and transportation via the Luminate® Platform. With enterprise-level speed and scalability and a unified view of the entire supply chain, customers will experience faster, closed-loop, business decision-making and responsiveness, creating a more transparent, resilient, and agile supply chain.
- A Single Data Cloud. Blue Yonder’s unified data cloud solves the supply chain data problem by eliminating data silos and minimizing the need to create and manage integrations with external business applications. Blue Yonder makes it easier and more cost effective for customers to access, manage and utilize data while enabling secure, seamless data sharing. Leveraging a single data source across planning and execution empowers Blue Yonder customers to bring together disparate factors into centralized decisioning and action.
- Infused Predictive AI and ML. Blue Yonder continues to enhance its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics with new, cutting-edge capabilities. Innovations such as polytope analysis allow customers to accelerate scenario planning, automatically analyzing hundreds of potential scenarios in just minutes to generate optimal recommendations. Furthermore, Blue Yonder’s deep meta learning autonomously and continuously learns to select and configure the best data combinations for scenario planning so customers can capture the value of unlimited data without analyzing it for hours.
- Harnessing the Power of Generative AI. Blue Yonder is bringing together generative AI with its planning and execution API, and trained on deep industry knowledge and the experience obtained through the operation of thousands of supply chains to deliver Blue Yonder Orchestrator.Blue Yonder Orchestrator reimagines the user experience, going beyond data collation, and delivers faster insights using everyday language by combining the power of Blue Yonder to predict potential disruptions or opportunities with guided user decision-making. These AI and ML capabilities deliver better data-driven insights, resulting in incredibly smart, fast, agile, and responsive supply chains.
- Cloud Native, Composable Microservices. Blue Yonder’s composable microservices enable companies to augment and enhance existing technologies with faster deployment times and reduced cost, with no need to rip and replace existing investments. Implementation time is reduced to months, helping customers scale up faster, accelerate innovation and lower total cost of ownership.
Blue Yonder is also accelerating investments in key application areas to ensure customers continue to get the most out of their investments:
- Optimizing operational uptime and profitability for warehouse customers. The cost per hour of halted warehouse operations can easily exceed the million-dollar mark. Launching in 2024, always-on Warehouse Management builds upon Blue Yonder’s industry-leading warehouse capabilities with zero downtime and upgrade-safe extensibility to ensure customer warehouses will stay online. Blue Yonder is also enhancing its Warehouse Execution System with advanced resource orchestration services that empower businesses to distribute tasks across labor and machines. These services account for the capacity and capabilities to intelligently optimize throughput and operational cost.
- Delivering end-to-end visibility and cost savings for logistics service providers, manufacturers and retailers. Blue Yonder is adding high-volume parcel capabilities to track packages all the way from shipment to final consumer destination. Blue Yonder is also breaking down functional silos to deliver new capabilities, such as 3D Load Building, which connects warehouse, transportation, and production operations to see across constraints to maximize trailer utilization and boost payloads while minimizing trips. 3D Load Building also optimizes loads within the trailer to reduce the time required to unpack pallets and make drop-offs.
- Saving retailers time and money with enhanced Category Management capabilities. For retail customers, Blue Yonder has launched Strategic Space as part of its industry-leading Category Management suite, which uses data science to optimize store space while automatically updating planograms, resulting in 50% less time spent on major refits and 90% less time for minor refits. DC Smoothing, the latest retail replenishment planning capability, can save retailers millions of dollars in unplanned warehouse labor changes by automatically factoring in the incremental cost of additional labor against fixed capacity at the warehouse when proposing replenishment recommendations.
- Taking problem solving to the next level of speed and performance for manufacturers. Blue Yonder is augmenting their industry-leading supply chain planning optimization capabilities with the launch of Unified Solver, which brings together the complete spectrum of Blue Yonder’s fulfillment solver capabilities and autonomously determines the best combination of proven optimizations and heuristics to apply to a given scenario.
Customer Experience:
Blue Yonder’s President, Customer Experience and Cloud, Darren Saumur, highlighted three new initiatives Blue Yonder recently launched to its customers:
- Composable Journey: To support Blue Yonder’s goal of 12X transformation in value creation, the company is helping its customers develop a roadmap on how they can best transform using the suite of Cognitive composable solutions coming from Blue Yonder. Leveraging both our platform and microservices, Blue Yonder is revolutionizing the way technology is adopted. Customers will be able to better understand the benefits, new functionality, and interoperability of these solutions alongside current capabilities to realize greater value, faster.
- Data Science as a Service: For supply chain leaders drowning in a sea of data, Blue Yonder’s Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) provides exclusive access to data scientists who combine expertise in managing global supply chains and leveraging AI and ML. Regular supply chain reviews unlock proactive insights and superior forecasts to inform better business decisions, while expert collaboration creates a direct line to data scientists who analyze data and coach internal teams on how to become forecasting experts.
- White Glove Support: With White Glove Support, Blue Yonder will offer a dedicated support model to its large SaaS enterprise customers. The aim is to proactively maintain, monitor and guide their mission-critical applications and maximize value. White Glove Support is designed to meet the need for deeper insights, more agile working processes and faster response times, as well as give Blue Yonder the opportunity to team up with customers to help them navigate their changing business landscape.
“We are investing in the customer experience to revolutionize the way our customers adopt our innovations. We are also enhancing our cloud and support teams to boost reliability and scalability of our products with a goal to help our clients drive a 12X return on investment through new product innovation, interoperability and IT simplification,” said Saumur.
Sustainability:
Blue Yonder’s new chief sustainability officer, Saskia van Gendt, presented key insights into how supply chain solutions can help support sustainability initiatives and goals. She shared how Blue Yonder is looking to address carbon emissions across the entire supply chain from planning to execution through its Luminate Platform, which provides end-to-end visibility and will offer orchestration capabilities to reduce waste, mitigate risk and enhance ecosystem relationships. Several Blue Yonder customers already use the company’s solutions to achieve better sustainability outcomes today – avoiding carbon emissions by optimizing transportation, decreasing food waste, reducing excess inventory disposal, and more. Van Gendt also shared that Blue Yonder will launch a comprehensive sustainability solution in Q4 2024.
Last-mile logistics are where supply chains can make the most immediate impact on sustainability, which is why Blue Yonder announced the intent to acquire Doddle earlier today. Once completed, the deal will allow Blue Yonder’s already robust suite of supply chain management and commerce offerings to expand with full-circle expertise encompassing both returns management and reverse logistics.
“The opportunity for Blue Yonder to empower its customers on sustainability is enormous and timely,” said van Gendt. “Almost all our customers have public-facing sustainability goals. By further integrating sustainability into our solutions, we will help solve our customers’ problems and deepen our value. With interoperability being an enabler for achieving real sustainability outcomes, I’m excited by a future where our customers can understand their actual environmental footprints with end-to-end visibility.”
