Blue Yonder Boosts Manufacturing Cognitive Demand Planning

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 fulfillment, 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.

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.

Blue Yonder: true supply chain leadership

Blue Yonder’s expertise in the supply chain domain, particularly in supply chain planning, is widely acknowledged. Recently, the company was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for supply chain planning solutions.

As one of the few prominent providers offering comprehensive solutions, Blue Yonder supports businesses in effectively managing and optimising their supply chain operations with a forward-thinking approach.

In an era marked by continual uncertainty, it’s more important than ever for companies to future-proof their operations.

Currently, Blue Yonder empowers 3,000 leading global brands to fully leverage their data, enabling integration, processing and large-scale decision-making across supply chains.

Its supply chain data cloud provides an end-to-end, holistic view that allows businesses to plan proactively, execute efficiently and enhance 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 advanced, integrated solution spans supply chain, retail planning, logistics and delivery, employing machine learning to predict and resolve potential disruptions.

Cognitive Demand Planning: the assistant for manufacturing

The latest advancement in Blue Yonder’s planning portfolio is Cognitive Demand Planning, an AI-powered assistant tailored to help manufacturers tackle the complexities of high-tech manufacturing.

This innovative solution delivers real-time planning capabilities aimed at boosting supply chain efficiency and competitiveness. It also features advanced analytics, real-time causal simulation and integrated collaboration, providing high-tech companies with the agility and responsiveness needed to thrive in a fast-paced environment.

“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,” says Hemant Chickermane, Senior Director of Industry Strategy at Blue Yonder.

“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.”

Cognitive Demand Planning: What are its capabilities?

Blue Yonder’s Cognitive Demand Planning incorporates autonomous mix-and-match capabilities with real-time causal analysis to address factors that impact demand forecasts.

Understanding which variables are most significant enables demand planners to actively shape demand using a combination of statistical methods and advanced AI and ML algorithms, delivering precise forecasts across regions, time frames, customer segments and product lines.

Unified Planning Process

This solution seamlessly integrates data and business processes in real time, helping high-tech manufacturers streamline decision-making and minimise silos.

By aligning supply and production planning with real-time customer demand signals, Cognitive Demand Planning enhances forecast accuracy by up to 12% and boosts planner productivity by more than 75%.

Intelligent Scenario Planning

Cognitive Demand Planning enables planners to incorporate cross-functional and external data swiftly, accelerating decision-making processes.

This reduces planning cycles from weeks or months to mere minutes, aligning businesses with current demand trends.

With data-driven insights, planners can develop realistic scenarios and forecast potential outcomes, facilitating better collaboration with suppliers and reducing supply-demand variability, excess inventory risks and missed revenue opportunities.

Noteworthy success stories

Blue Yonder has a long list of success stories when it comes to demand planning. 

One example is beer manufacturer Heineken which utilised Cognitive Demand Planning to reduce bias and improve forecast accuracy and by considering dynamic internal and external variables.

Heineken is benefitting immensely from the partnership, with the ability to make more data-driven and informed decisions.

“We want to continuously improve our supply chain processes and adopting Blue Yonder Cognitive Demand Planning is an important step in that ambition,” says 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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