Blue Yonder Wins SBR International Business Award for Supply Chain Technology

During the annual SBR International Business Awards ceremony in Singapore, Blue Yonder won a Technology Award for its efforts to drive customer profitability through its LuminateTM Planning solutions.

Blue Yonder is the world leader in digital supply chain and omni-channel commerce fulfilment. With its intelligent, end-to-end platform, it allows retailers, manufacturers and logistics providers to seamlessly predict, pivot and fulfil customer demand.

Blue Yonder was approached by the world's number-one tractor company (by volume). Providing authentic vehicle and tractor spare parts via advanced capabilities in sourcing, assembling, warehousing and distribution, the company was looking to provide greater product variety, higher service levels, and faster customer response times across its vast automotive and farm equipment spare parts portfolio.

To do this, the customer needed to enhance its traditional segmentation processes and tools that required continuous monitoring. Consequently, this led to inefficient allocation of inventory and less than optimal service levels.

The customer turned to Blue Yonder's dynamic segmentation capabilities within its Luminate Planning portfolio to help solve this problem. An existing Blue Yonder customer, the company had achieved outstanding results over the past two years with Blue Yonder's supply chain management solutions, including improved accuracy, inventory levels and fill rates, through the optimisation of its segmentation and inventory stocks.

Enhancing the partnership further, the customer will use Blue Yonder's Luminate Platform that applies machine learning (ML) algorithms to both systematically classify spare parts into unique demand clusters and establish the significance of demand attributes. Utilising these new capabilities, Blue Yonder's customer was able to leverage ML to analyse data at scale and identify key factors that drive advanced segmentation. This helped the company develop distinct supply chain operations to meet specific market segments and balance cost-to-serve for each segment. As a result, the company's planners can understand the reasons for delays and better predict arrival times, ensuring greater consistency and more time for strategic tasks.

Some of the customers’ key achievements include:

• Overall, 10% reduction in inventory quantity
• For location-based segmentation, a 6% reduction in inventory value
• For overall segmentation, a 6% reduction in inventory value and a 4% reduction in inventory quantity

Manufacturing and distribution companies face an increasing range of customer demands, with market dynamics changing faster than most organisations' ability to adjust segments and execution. Blue Yonder helps maintain an edge against the competition by dynamically segmenting supply chain strategies and operations leveraging ML. Where teams used to spend the majority of their time solving recurring problems as if they were new ones, Luminate Planning uses ML to track behaviour to not only repeat proven resolution steps but also make recommendations to improve efficiency. Additionally, where in the past teams spent weeks on segmentation exercises to distribute products by region based on a myriad of individual assumptions, today, this can be done in milliseconds.

Blue Yonder's dynamic segmentation capabilities have been a game-changer for the customer because it enabled its planners to provide differentiated service levels based on customer value and business parameters. This allowed the company to increase profitability amid an increasingly complex marketplace—and even during the global pandemic.

To learn more about the awards visit the SBR International Business Award website. To learn more about Blue Yonder visit blueyonder.com.  

Watch the interview below to know more about their winning project: