Blue Yonder’s Puneet Saxena on supply chain digitalisation

In the manufacturing sector, supply chain disruptions are part of day-to-day life, but it's important to consider those in the context of overall supply chain management. At Blue Yonder, Puneet Saxena, Corporate Vice President of Industry Strategies for Manufacturing, and his team look at technology innovation in three parts: 

• AI
• End-to-end supply chain management 
• Interoperability.

Software developer Blue Yonder is a world leader in digital supply chain innovation.

“We decide which sub verticals to target, our message for each of these sub verticals, our solutions and how we differentiate and add value to our customers in the process,” Puneet explains. “We currently focus on high technology, semiconductors, consumer packaged goods, food and beverages, automotive, industrial and life sciences industries. Industry strategy is about working with your product and continuing to enhance your solutions to add value to the market and customers.”

Puneet has worked in the manufacturing industry since 1993, starting out as a manufacturing analyst with a semiconductor company, where his role was to bring in new practices to the industry.

“After six years, I moved to i2 Technologies based in Dallas. At the time it was one of the pioneering companies that brought in supply chain planning software to global enterprises; we were thinking about supply chain planning as connected planning and end-to-end global optimisation,” Puneet says. 

Later on, i2 Technologies was acquired by JDA Software, which was heavily focused on machine learning and AI. JDA Software then acquired Blue Yonder, another market leader in AI solutions for retail and supply chain, which is how Puneet ended up where he is now.  

How technology innovations can prepare organisations for supply chain disruptions

AI has come a long way over the past decade. Overall supply chain management is about delivering Operational Total Shareholder Returns across a host of processes: demand planning, supply planning, inventory optimisation, production scheduling, sales and operations planning, customer collaboration, supply collaboration, allocation planning, order promising, warehouse management, transportation management and more. 

“In each of these processes, we ask, how can AI help provide our customers an edge? At Blue Yonder, we are the only company that goes end-to-end with supply chain management, bringing together planning, execution and commerce,” says Puneet. “This means that when a customer makes a decision in the planning domain, they are also aware of how it affects warehousing decisions or transportation management.”

Finally, through interoperability, Blue Yonder thinks about how the team can make things better from a cross-functional operational excellence perspective. 

“We are showing our customers that by making decisions in a connected, end-to-end interoperable manner, they’ll be better off as an organisation,” he says. 

While Gen AI is still relatively new, Puneet sees that it has lots of potential to evolve. 

“Companies have massive reporting and analytics frameworks they use to study supply chain data,” he says. “They ask questions from that data, such as ‘How have our sales been trending over the past three years?’ However, this leaves companies with hundreds of reports on supply chain behaviour because each report was designed to answer a single question. 

“Gen AI offers an opportunity for a user to ask a question in everyday language without the need for a predefined report. The user is presented with insights in a digestible format and recommended next steps,” Puneet explains. “It allows users to submit a query that the software understands and presents an answer without the hassle of wrangling data, toggling between multiple software applications, or relying on a technical team to create the framework or view.”

How predictive analytics can help optimise fluctuating global market conditions and ensure accurate forecasting

Blue Yonder’s retail customers have been using Predictive AI and Analytics for demand planning for a long time. 

“Supermarkets apply machine learning methods to predict what the store should order to replenish their shelves in an autonomous manner. However, we’re now seeing customers extending predictive methods on the manufacturing end, as well and using the technology to predict demand and supply disruptions,” Puneet explains. “Predictive Analytics allows companies to look at the impact of external causal factors. For example, if we took a semiconductor company that serves the automotive market it must predict demand for semiconductor chips many months in advance given long manufacturing lead times for semiconductor devices.”

With Predictive Analytics, these companies can watch what's happening externally in China – the largest passenger car market in the world – and predict how it might affect the demand for its semiconductor devices in the future.
“Statistics are slow to catch up to what is happening in the real world but with Predictive AI, companies can observe what’s happening daily and course-correct much faster,” Puneet continues. “Therefore, global fluctuations are caught more rapidly using AI methods than the traditional methods.”

Puneet believes that planning in manufacturing will continue to become more autonomous. 

“We’re seeing more examples of light-out factories being run by robots and advanced equipment, for example, current automotive assembly lines are becoming increasingly automated. As manufacturing becomes more autonomous and advanced, so too will supply chain planning and execution processes, which means that the reliance on technology is simply going to keep increasing in a positive way,” he adds. “Companies will become more customer-focused and they’ll also be able to redirect talent into doing something that adds value to manufacturing and the overall business performance.”

Blue Yonder has a technology partnership with Microsoft, with its solutions being built on a Microsoft Azure platform. 

“We use the Azure platform as a service and combined with our technology, allows us to go to market faster,” he says. “We also partner with Snowflake, the data cloud company. Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform and the Snowflake Data Cloud empower joint customers with an end-to-end supply chain solution for faster, more accurate and informed decision making.”

As a company, Blue Yonder continues to grow. In FY23, company revenue was US$1.28bn, including 17% SaaS revenue growth year-over-year. They also gained a total of 167 new customers.

 Over the next three years, Blue Yonder will invest over US$1bn into product innovation, to make its solutions smarter, more powerful, more connected and more capable of delivering real-world value.  Puneet and his team are also investing in developing and growing their team of smart, talented associates who are passionate and eager to generate customer value that, in turn, produces larger societal benefits. 

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