Blue Yonder’s Demand Planning Boost for Manufacturers

Countless major retailers, manufacturers and logistics service providers around the world rely on Blue Yonder to optimise and streamline their entire supply chains, covering everything from planning and fulfilment to delivery and returns.

Leveraging the immense power of AI, the company's supply chain platform and multi-enterprise, multi-tier network facilitates accurate forecasting and adaptable management of capacity, inventory, and transportation.

In essence, Blue Yonder equips businesses with the tools required to handle modern challenges and uncertainties through more resilient, sustainable operations, thereby improving customer satisfaction, increasing profitability and ensuring seamless performance.

A supply chain planning leader

Blue Yonder’s capabilities in the supply chain space, especially as they pertain to supply chain planning, are renowned.

The company was recently recognised in fact as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for supply chain planning solutions.

Blue Yonder is one of very few key vendors which can be relied upon to offer comprehensive solutions that help businesses manage and optimise their supply chain operations effectively – with one eye on the future. 

Of course, in today’s ongoing era of uncertainty, it’s essential for companies to future-proof their operations.

Blue Yonder already enables 3,000 of the world’s top brands to harness the full potential of their data, allowing them to integrate, process and take large-scale actions across their supply chains.

Its supply chain data cloud offers a comprehensive, end-to-end perspective that empowers businesses to plan proactively, execute seamlessly and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Blue Yonder's platform, meanwhile, supports its premier supply chain management solutions and is recognised for its real-time visibility, demand management and lifecycle pricing capabilities.

This intelligent, integrated tech solution covers supply chain, retail planning, logistics, and delivery, utilising machine learning to anticipate and resolve disruptions.

Introducing Cognitive Demand Planning

The latest evolution in Blue Yonder’s planning portfolio is Cognitive Demand Planning, an assistant helping manufacturers to address the complexities of the high-tech manufacturing landscape. 

This AI-powered solution offers real-time planning capabilities designed to enhance supply chain efficiency and competitiveness.

It also supports advanced analytics, real-time causal simulation and integrated collaboration, ensuring high-tech companies have the agility and responsiveness needed to succeed in a dynamic environment.

Hemant Chickermane, Senior Director of Industry Strategy at Blue Yonder, outlines how Cognitive Demand Planning can assist manufacturers in overcoming the challenges that come with having a globally-dispersed network. 

“There’s no getting around it: high-tech manufacturers face enormous challenges every day in getting the right product to the right place at the right time – and doing so profitably across thousands of supply chain miles,” he says. 

“Amid these challenges, there is good news. Developments in AI, machine learning and data science have created the real-time demand planning capabilities that high-tech manufacturers desperately need.

“High-tech demand planning is complex. But Blue Yonder has listened to the needs of customers and responded with a powerful solution that reduces latency by capturing accurate demand signals, drives greater agility to support short product lifecycles and automates planning to boost productivity and competitiveness.”

Key capabilities of Cognitive Demand Planning

• Autonomous mix-and-match with real-time causal analysis
  

Demand forecasts in any supply chain are influenced by numerous factors. The question is, which of these matter most? Gaining a deeper understanding of cause and effect surely has the potential to help demand planners actively shape demand. Blue Yonder's Cognitive Demand Planning empowers high-tech planning teams to use an optimal combination of statistical methods alongside advanced AI and ML algorithms to create highly-accurate demand forecasts across regions, time frames, customer segments and product lines.

• Intelligent scenario planning
  

Cognitive Demand Planning allows planners to incorporate evolving cross-functional and external data, speeding up and enhancing decision-making. This capability can reduce planning cycles from months or weeks to a matter of minutes, enabling teams to align with current demand trends. Using data-driven insights, planners can build realistic scenarios to forecast outcomes in advance. By sharing these insights and projections with suppliers, high-tech companies can reduce supply-demand variability, mitigate the risk of excess inventory and capture revenue opportunities accurately.

• A unified planning process
  

Designed to seamlessly connect data and business processes in real time, Blue Yonder's Cognitive Demand Planning helps high-tech manufacturers streamline enterprise-wide decision-making and reduce silos. The solution ensures that supply and production planning are synchronised with real-time customer demand signals, resulting in up to 12% improvement in forecast accuracy and a more-than-75% boost in demand planner productivity.

Demand planning success

Blue Yonder can already boast a number of success stories when it comes to demand planning. 

Dutch beer giant Heineken, for example, implemented Cognitive Demand Planning to improve forecast accuracy and reduce bias by considering dynamic external and internal variables.

Heineken stands to enjoy numerous benefits from the partnership and now has the ability to make more informed, data-driven decisions, manage complexity, boost accuracy and respond faster. 

“We want to continuously improve our supply chain processes and adopting Blue Yonder Cognitive Demand Planning is an important step in that ambition,” explained Corneel Hindriks, Global Digital & Technology Manager for Supply Chain Planning at Heineken, earlier this year.

“Working together with Blue Yonder will support us in our ambition to become the best-connected brewer and foster functional excellence in demand planning, leading to improved customer experience.”

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