Blue Yonder has announced what it claims is the biggest update to its platform ever. The company has invested heavily in Blue Yonder’s Platform Data Cloud, Powered by Snowflake. The most notable aspect is the launch of interoperable solutions powered by microservices across planning, warehouse, transportation, commerce and more. The solutions are delivered on the Blue Yonder Luminate Cognitive Platform and offer customers increased productivity, reduced waste, and greater supply chain resiliency.
Duncan Angove, CEO of Blue Yonder, commented, “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.
“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. 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.”
The Blue Yonder platform has already sought to solve the challenge faced by Retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers. The company has now brought its solutions closer together by combining cognitive AI, a centralised data cloud and the creation of composable microservices.
The combination of these three cutting-edge technologies enables it to create interoperable solutions that help solve many of the challenges faced by businesses. Importantly, it provides the architecture that Blue Yonder can further develop to deliver even more capabilities.
New and updated solutions
Hidden within what is a huge press release are announcements about several new or recent solutions that take advantage of the three key pillars. The first of these are the Blue Yonder planning solutions that also leverage the power of Blue Yonder Orchestrator with its generative AI capability.
These solutions include:
- Cognitive Merchandise Financial Planning (for retailers)
- Cognitive Demand Planning (for retailers and manufacturers)
Blue Yonder has also updated and continues to offer a wide set of applications to retailers. These include Forecasting for Retail, Replenishment for Retail, Intelligent Allocation, Workforce Management, Commerce, Warehouse, Transportation, and Logistics Networks. It plans to roll out more solutions in Q1 2024.
For manufacturers, solutions include Integrated Demand and Supply Planning for Industries, enhancements across Warehousing, Transportation, Logistics Network, Commerce, Control Tower, and more.
For logistics companies, there are major updates to the Warehouse Execution System. It has added advanced resource orchestration services across labour and robots. Later in 2024, it will launch always-on Warehouse Management, taking its WMS solution evergreen to enable zero downtime for customers.
It also provided updates to its other fulfilment and logistics solutions. These include Transportation Optimization, Transportation Manager, Warehouse Labor Management, Adaptive Fulfillment and Warehousing, Yard Management, Billing Management, and more.
Angove added, “Cognitive planning takes business planning accuracy and speed to the next level by empowering companies to realize their performance objectives. It does this by allowing them to be aware of critical events and prescribing solutions to manage risks and opportunities in both demand and supply, improving planner productivity and supply chain resilience.”
Other solutions include:
Blue Yonder Analyst Workbench
The Analyst Workbench provides a user-friendly experience to explore data, visualize metrics and generate insights. Its innovative capabilities deliver end-to-end visibility across the network. It includes the ability to mix, match, and analyze data from any digital touch point, driving more informed decisions and actions.
Blue Yonder Unified Commerce Simulator
This digital twin capability empowers businesses to create, analyze, and refine fulfilment sourcing strategies. It will help drive more predictable fulfilment results with less risk to the business. Businesses can manipulate optimization levers for various scenarios. They can also run simulations against production data to enable comparisons.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a huge update from Blue Yonder, which the above article has just scratched the surface of. Key to the announcement is the partnership with Snowflake. That provides the company with a single data repository which powers all of the orchestrations required for a modern business.
Angove neatly summarised the benefits Blue Yonder can deliver, saying, “Retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers will achieve superior performance with intelligent insight and informed decisions to ensure they are ahead of every disruption with complete visibility at every point of execution.
“With advanced customer insights about buying behaviour and preferences, businesses can make informed decisions about inventory allocation, optimized fulfilment, transportation planning and warehouse operations.”
Blue Yonder works with many of the world’s largest organisations, and this update does not disappoint. However, without further detail there are a couple of questions worth noting. The addition of microservices seems just that, an addition. It does not appear to be a re-architecting of its platforms. This may bring some limitations to the capabilities.
Secondly, Blue Yonder, unlike other vendors, has not pushed its generative AI capabilities to the forefront. That may be deliberate, as it looks to solve the business issues rather than hype its new technology. Even though it has not pushed it, it is embedded with the new cognitive planning solutions.
