As technology innovation and acceleration have helped Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies across the entire supply chain deploy new systems and solutions that improve responsiveness to tumultuous customer demand and supply disruptions, many continue to face costly challenges upstream and downstream.
Even in today’s connected economy, business processes remain siloed, leading to communication breakdowns, lack of visibility, disconnected solutions, and time-consuming workflows that span the supply chain from the first mile to the last mile. All these hurdles result in lost sales, overstock, wastage, unnecessarily high costs, and a lack of resilience.
To protect their bottom lines, supply chains must build greater resilience and mitigate market volatility end-to-end, says Brett Egglestone, senior industry strategies director at leading supply chain solutions provider Blue Yonder.
“Today’s supply chains are operated by a fragmented ecosystem of legacy solutions, with many being stitched together over time with custom configurations and code,” Egglestone explains.
Enter the largest product update in Blue Yonder’s history – the world’s first dedicated, end-to-end, cognitive supply chain platform within a single data cloud – which unveiled numerous innovations including new Generative AI capabilities (Blue Yonder Orchestrator) to enable more efficient, intelligent planning while delivering unlocked productivity, and interoperable workflows that connect data, systems and processes across Blue Yonder supply chain applications. With these advancements, Blue Yonder’s Luminate Cognitive Platform enables intelligence synchronisation of complex workflows, all running on a single data cloud to enhance transparency, collaboration and decision-making.
This innovative approach enables customers to derive even more value out of their Blue Yonder investments, by managing sourcing, production, logistics, and network strategies and capacities from a single supply chain operating system to shorten lead times, improve service levels, optimise operational efficiencies, maximise demand, and reduce costs. Blue Yonder also introduced Composable Journeys, personalised implementation and upgrade paths that empower its customers to identify and prioritise new technology adoption, so they can take advantage of Blue Yonder’s extensive, industry-leading supply chain solution set and patented technology at their path and pace.
“The ability to bring together historically disparate processes and data allows, for instance, a dramatic increase in accuracy and speed by empowering business teams to collaborate in real-time, thereby exceeding their performance objectives. This is achieved by allowing teams to be aware of critical events across the supply chain and then prescribe solutions and outcomes to manage risks and opportunities in both demand and supply, improving both planner productivity and supply chain resilience,” says Egglestone.
“While many supply chain solution providers claim to offer end-to-end capabilities, it is typically confined to planning or execution spaces where they’ve integrated their own product suites,” says Duncan Angove, Blue Yonder’s CEO. “Blue Yonder is changing that. With this release, we are redefining end-to-end supply chains, and establishing a new category of solutions with interoperable capabilities aligned with our vision to create the supply chain operating system for the world.”
For retailers, Blue Yonder has built strategically necessary functions and capabilities to help retailers grow revenue through improved customer service and demand planning. In addition, these capabilities maximise profitability through optimised resource utilisation and seamless execution through enhanced retail planning, order management, and workforce management solutions.
For manufacturers and wholesalers, Blue Yonder’s new release includes solutions and capabilities that help unlock productivity and take problem-solving to a new level of speed and performance.
For logistics companies, Blue Yonder offers end-to-end visibility and cost savings for fulfilment and logistics operations. The company has enhanced its Warehouse Execution System with advanced resource orchestration services across labour and resources (such as robots). Always-on warehouse management builds upon Blue Yonder’s warehouse solutions with upgrade-safe extensibility and zero downtime during upgrades to ensure customer warehouses will stay online.
“Blue Yonder Orchestrator will become an invaluable tool to guide business users in making the complex and strategic decisions required to drive tangible benefits and improvements,” says Egglestone.
“Retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers will achieve superior performance with intelligent insights and informed decisions to ensure they are ahead of every disruption with complete visibility at every point of execution,” concludes Angove.
