Supply chain solutions provider Blue Yonder has announced the release of its largest product update in the history of the company, launching the first set of interoperable solutions across the entire supply chain – from planning to warehouse, transportation, and commerce.
The interoperable solutions, delivered on the company’s Luminate Cognitive Platform, will offer customers increased productivity and visibility, reduced waste and more resilient supply chains, the company noted.
“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,” said Duncan Angove, CEO of Blue Yonder.
“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,” Angove added.
End-to-end interoperability
Blue Yonder’s interoperable offering connects processes, systems, and data seamlessly across the company’s Supply Chain Planning and Execution solutions, providing a smarter, more scalable, real-time digital twin to streamline and accelerate enterprise-wide decision-making.
The solutions also offer the end-to-end visibility needed to understand how decisions or actions impact adjacent teams so businesses can work synchronously toward a unified goal.
Furthermore, deeply embedding AI and machine learning within the systems can help drive decisioning, recommendations, and actions to support a future of autonomous supply chains. All solutions are also connected through a single source of data, allowing true real-time collaboration across functions.
Technology innovations
This interoperability has been enabled by several technology innovations at Blue Yonder, including the development of its Luminate Cognitive supply chain platform. Blue Yonder’s cloud-native applications all run on this centralized platform.
Another innovation is the Composable Microservices offering. Blue Yonder’s composable microservices are small, deployable components that each offer a discrete set of capabilities, seamlessly integrated on connected workflows to solve specific functional needs, and interoperable with existing Blue Yonder solutions so businesses can innovate without the need to rip and replace existing investments.
Furthermore, Blue Yonder is among the first enterprise supply chain solutions companies building applications to natively run on the Snowflake Data Cloud. Blue Yonder’s Platform Data Cloud, Powered by Snowflake, makes it easy to deliver the right data, at the right location, at the right time by bringing together all the required data to run your supply chain in a centralized location.
Next generation planning
The first set of microservice-based solutions that bring together all these interoperable features is Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning solutions. This holistic offering natively runs on the Luminate Cognitive Platform to deliver all the cognitive capabilities needed to support supply chain leaders in achieving higher forecast accuracy, accelerating decision making, and building a more resilient supply chain with fewer resources.
Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning solutions also leverage the power of Blue Yonder Orchestrator, the company’s generative AI capability that allows businesses to fuel more intelligent decision-making and faster supply chain orchestration.
Synchronized execution
Another of Blue Yonder’s interoperable solutions is Synchronized Execution, which according to the firm, strengthens supply chain resiliency with end-to-end execution interoperability and helps businesses manage disruptions in an optimal and automated fashion by synchronizing the data and business process workflows across the order, warehouse, transportation, and resource domains.
Customers will achieve operational resiliency through real-time situational awareness, real-time decision making, and the ability to predict and prevent disruptions.
Solutions launched in this space include Analyst Workbench, which delivers a new, user-friendly experience to explore data, visualize metrics and generate insights, and Unified Commerce Simulator, which empowers businesses to create, analyze, and refine fulfillment sourcing strategies driving more predictable fulfillment results with less risk to the business.
Highlights for logistics
With the latest product update, Blue Yonder has also enhanced its Warehouse Execution System with advanced resource orchestration services across labor and robots. Also launching in 2024, always-on Warehouse Management builds upon Blue Yonder’s industry-leading warehouse capabilities with upgrade-safe extensibility and zero downtime during upgrades to ensure customer warehouses will stay online.
Returns research
Alongside its product update, Blue Yonder has also released the key findings of a recent survey into reverse logistics. The findings revealed that 63% of the 200 US retailers surveyed face significant challenges with the management of returns as customers increasingly turn to online shopping options.
Despite the vast majority (89%) of retailers having changed their returns policies in the past 12 months to make them more expensive for consumers, or otherwise tightening the restrictions around returns, more than half (59%) experienced an increase in the rate of returns over that same period, suggesting these changes have not deterred customers from returning orders.
Overall, only 13% of retailers reported a decline in returns over that same 12-month period.
Shannon Wu-Lebron, Corporate Vice President, Retail Industry Strategy, Blue Yonder, said: “This proves that putting the onus on consumers is not necessarily the solution to control returns. Instead, retailers should be looking at technology to help them find better ways to manage the returns and reverse logistics process to reduce costs, improve inventory resell rates, and protect customer loyalty.”
Click here to read the full E-commerce Returns 2024.
