Blue Yonder wins new customers for digital supply chain solutions
Blue Yonder has signed up more retailers and logistics companies around the world for its various digital supply chain software solutions.
In the USA, ProTrans, an award-winning transportation and supply chain management provider, will offer its customers transportation modeling through Blue Yonder’s modeling solution. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are looking for ways to optimize their supply chains and operations, while reducing costs.
By using Blue Yonder’s modeling solution, ProTrans will be able to help its customers determine the best way to run their transportation network. Through what-if scenarios, the modeling solution finds the most efficient and lowest-cost network to satisfy all user-defined requirements and customer-focused objectives. This in turn helps ProTrans’ customers identify cost savings and customer service opportunities.
The solution runs on the Blue Yonder Luminate Platform, which combines data from both internal and external sources – spanning shippers’ digital supply chain ecosystems – to leverage both artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), enabling smarter and more actionable business decisions.
“Blue Yonder’s modeling solution complements everything we value at ProTrans: data mining, analysis, optimization, and visibility. For us, the decision to use Blue Yonder was all about our customers and providing them the tools necessary for strategic decision making. We are excited about what Blue Yonder will offer,” Shawn Masters, chief commercial officer, ProTrans.
Real-time freight transport pricing
Separately, FitzMark, Inc., a nationwide leader in freight management and solutions, is expanding its digital marketplace capabilities through the dynamic price discovery solution from Blue Yonder which it will integrate into its custom-developed transportation management software DASH. Through the solution, FitzMark will provide instant quoting of real-time, market-based prices and instant booking capabilities to its customers.
FitzMark will also be able to work with Blue Yonder’s transportation management customers, who can seamlessly adopt and utilize the dynamic price discovery solution. With expertise in the beverage industry, FitzMark is looking to offer its services to Blue Yonder’s diverse shipper community in this segment.
Digital fulfilment technology
In Italy, grocery retailer Maxi Di is moving to Blue Yonder’s digital fulfilment supply chain platform to improve service levels for its distribution network and customers. Both companies have renewed their more than 10-year collaboration by migrating the existing space planning and replenishment solutions to SaaS and cloud, based on Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform, which empowers digital supply chains.
Maxi Di is an Italian large-scale grocery retailer and is part of the Selex Group. Maxi Di operates through different brands, including A&O for proximity shops; Famila, Famila Superstore and Iperfamila for supermarkets and hypermarkets format; Dpiù for discount supermarkets; and C+C Cash and Carry for HORECA customers.
Blue Yonder’s digital fulfilment supply chain platform, running on Microsoft Azure, provides synchronized business planning and execution. It will allow Maxi Di to leverage heterogeneous data from sources both inside and outside the company, positively impacting the manufacturing and distribution processes.
Warehouse management solution
In Colombia, logistics company Almaviva selected Blue Yonder´s warehouse management solution (WMS) to manage its distribution center storage operations in a multi-customer, multi-warehouse and multi-product format, in real-time. The project was implemented by Netlogistik, one of the first three Blue Yonder partners to have achieved accreditation in WMS.
Almaviva has more than 45 distribution centers in 23 cities, covering seaports, border cities and the main industrial and commercial centers of the country. The 252,000 square meter of yard storage and 213,000 square meters of warehouse storage provide space to more than 3.5 million goods moved daily. Almaviva offers a range of services including storage, customs, urban distribution, domestic transport, document management, financial services, international cargo, and consulting.
The most important challenge that arose during the WMS implementation was the restructuring of what was planned in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The challenge that we never imagined we would face – and one that no one would have thought to include in any risk matrix – was the arrival of a pandemic that quickly impacted our country. The COVID-19 pandemic forced all of Colombia to enter into mandatory quarantine, which prevented the team from physically being in the warehouse. As a result, together with Netlogistik, we quickly had to rethink our plan so as not to affect the project. Today, I can say that quick action allowed us to continue with a different but functional strategy that resulted in a successful project implementation,” said Alexandra Duque, Almaviva’s project leader.
