Leading supply chain company’s intelligent, AI-powered, platform-driven solutions help businesses rapidly adjust to demand and disruptions while driving cost efficiency and resiliency
NASHVILLE, Tenn. & DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–As volatility increases and economic concerns grow, supply chain leaders are under intense pressure to optimize every aspect of their supply chain to maximize profits and avoid bottlenecks. With its latest product release that was showcased at its annual customer conference, ICON 2025, Blue Yonder delivers several artificial intelligence (AI)-infused Cognitive Solutions, accelerating long-range and intraday decision making, even in the most complex situations, for increased resiliency, resource leverage, and cost control.
“Our latest product release helps businesses tackle volatility, improve profit margins, and reduce complexity,” said Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder. “By leveraging our AI-powered, platform-driven Cognitive Solutions, directly connected to the Blue Yonder Network, companies can achieve unprecedented agility and resilience, enabling them to anticipate and respond to market changes with speed and precision. This empowers our customers to not only meet current demands but also to strategically position themselves for future growth and success.”
With this product release, Blue Yonder advancements are focused on the following key areas:
Cognitive Solutions Reimagine Supply Chain Management
Cognitive Solutions are designed to operate at machine speed, scale and precision with AI natively built-in, allowing supply chain teams and AI to seamlessly coordinate decisions and quickly refine workflows across all parts of their supply chain from planning to execution to returns management. Built on a modern and true cloud architecture for scale and access to advanced AI capabilities, the Cognitive Solutions on the Blue Yonder Platform leverage the AI data cloud to breakdown silos in the supply chain ecosystem and enable end-to-end interoperability through the power of unified decisioning on a multi-enterprise network. Cognitive Solutions are intelligent and agentic, offering reimagined experiences for users.
With Cognitive Solutions, Blue Yonder customers will receive the following benefits:
- Increased Agility To Address Mounting Business Uncertainty: Businesses can quickly evaluate risks and opportunities by aligning objectives and constraints using internal and external data sources, to reduce the time elapsed between planning and execution. Planners and operations managers can now build more scenarios on additional data in less time and then leverage the power of AI to quickly pinpoint the most effective path for optimized execution. And with a multi-enterprise network, businesses can use agentic AI to adjust operations in conjunction with trading partners to work around disruptions, optimize costs and more.
- Optimized Cost-to-Serve With Speed of Delivery: Businesses can optimize capital resource output, reduce inventory waste, and identify hidden inefficiencies to maximize profits and minimize cost-to-serve with AI- and machine learning (ML)-driven analysis across their supply chain.
- Simplified, AI- and ML-Driven Decisioning: Building on more than two decades of innovation in predictive analysis for supply chain management, Blue Yonder has expanded AI leverage across these Cognitive Solutions while also implementing more sophisticated ML techniques. AI agents enable businesses to utilize and act on vast amounts of supply chain data for optimizing decision-making, identifying patterns, and predicting disruptions – as well as opportunities – that humans might miss. Learn more about Blue Yonder’s AI agents here.
Cognitive Solutions support the high-speed decision-making required of today’s supply chain teams. These interoperable solutions span business processes and break down silos, supporting efficient collaboration.
Unified Planning and Streamlined Decisioning Across the Supply Chain for Manufacturers and Retailers
With Cognitive Solutions for supply chain planning, Blue Yonder delivers end-to-end, concurrent planning based on a common set of services and data. Both manufacturers and retailers gain new capabilities in this release. Manufacturers can optimize planning and boost profits by swiftly analyzing demand in unison with supply from across a multi-tier network of supply partners, and collaborating easily with suppliers and carriers to ensure they have the right materials that meet their specific requirements. Retailers can enhance ranging decisions in near real-time across sales, stock buying, inventory management, and financial management processes using the Blue Yonder Platform’s unified and centralized data management structure. This gives retailers the planning speed and flexibility they need to accelerate inventory turnover and minimize waste, even as customer and business demands evolve. New offerings in this release include:
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AI-Driven Demand and Supply Planning: Introduced during the last product release, Demand and Supply Planning eliminates traditional planning silos and redefines the strategic planning process. This release introduces new features, including:
- New product introduction analysis uses AI to analyze how the introduction of new products impacts supply requirements, production, and sourcing, as well as how to align with real-time consumer and market changes for more successful product launches.
- Multi-tier planning and orchestration expands the supply chain planning process by connecting supply, demand and inventory planning with the Blue Yonder Network, enabling multi-tier planning, responsiveness and supplier collaboration.
- Solver enhancements, along with new insight and optimization tools, enable planners to reduce excess inventory and safety stock costs while improving delivery accuracy and reducing production delays.
- Dynamic Integrated Business Planning: Enhancements to Integrated Business Planning automatically create risk and opportunity corridors that enable planners to explore a range of possible situations to assist them in creating more accurate plans in today’s age of uncertainty. In addition, dynamic constraints and planning capabilities enable planners to identify supply chain limits and use AI to recommend scenarios that achieve supply chain goals while aligning with broader company objectives.
- Enhanced Inventory Management for Retail: Building on the previous release of a seamless Allocation and Replenishment solution that supports the entire lifecycle of a product from introduction to end-of-life, this release introduces new features. This includes enhanced best balance ordering that allows retail planners to improve inventory fit for regional demands and prevent spoilage for date-sensitive inventory, reducing waste. The addition of rule-based store grouping allows retailers to predefine which factors (such as product demand, store sales, etc.) determine inventory allocation across stores. And ML-based behavioral clustering enables planners to analyze more supply chain planning data than legacy, rule-based systems, improving assortment mapping to seasonal buying trends and accelerating inventory turnover.
- End-to-End Assortment Planning for Softlines Retail: This release introduces new features to Assortment Planning targeted to softlines. Merchants and planners can better understand and manage the impact of their assortment decisions by leveraging its built-in AI agent, which analyzes historical performance, subscriptions, and fashion trends to determine the likelihood of future product sales against customer preferences, channel or regional idiosyncrasies, and events, amongst other causals.
Maximize Warehouse Efficiency and Speed With AI and ML
Blue Yonder is delivering its next-generation warehouse management solution built natively on the Blue Yonder Platform – combining 25 years of proven capabilities and a cloud-native platform in one solution. This allows effortless scalability and extensibility, no downtime code updates, and immediate access to AI and ML innovation. Businesses will dramatically improve warehouse efficiency with unprecedented adaptability and visibility, accelerated receipt and movement of goods, and optimized workforce performance. And it allows them to deliver optimized cost-to-serve metrics, in addition to reducing the cost per case metric within the warehouse. The new capabilities available for consumption at customer warehouses include:
- Improve Equipment Tracking in the Yard: Powered by computer vision and ML, businesses can automatically track equipment arriving and departing the yard, as well as the movement within the yard, resulting in increased efficiency and improved trailer prioritization. Computer vision technology detects equipment to create a 3D map of the yard, giving businesses operational visibility and the ability to search and identify available equipment to meet SLAs.
- Enable the Next Phase in People-Robot Collaboration: Warehouse managers can utilize the new robotics performance tracking capabilities to track their autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) like any other labor resource, with the ability to see productivity and utilization. And with automatic assignment reprocessing capabilities, warehouse managers can automatically attempt to reprocess failed or incorrect transactions to ensure data integrity.
- Support Retail Store Replenishment From the Warehouse: Using the new retail store replenishment capabilities, warehouse operators can integrate chase pick, garment on hanger, ratio packs, and more, enabling retailers and logistics service providers to replenish store inventory and stock levels across their store network. This improves inventory visibility and picking efficiency.
- Returns Process and Tracking for Added Visibility: The returns processing capability gives warehouses visibility into incoming Returns Merchandise Authorization (RMA) for more efficient returns, automates decision making, and enables faster processing to get goods back to sale more quickly.
Extend Supply Chain Visibility and Orchestration With a Multi-Enterprise Network
The Blue Yonder Network enables businesses to swiftly coordinate with suppliers, customers and carriers, optimizing the flow of goods and improving time to market to support profitable growth. With this release, the Blue Yonder Network now offers:
- Multi-Tier Networking for Blue Yonder Transportation Management: The integration of the Blue Yonder Network with Blue Yonder’s transportation management solutions delivers access to advanced telematics, automation of transportation appointment scheduling, and RFQ collaboration with suppliers and carriers. This enables real-time tuning of transportation plans and schedules.
- Scalable, Permission-Based BOM View: The multi-tier Bill of Material (BOM) management capability enables rapid tracking and adjustment of raw materials and components across multiple suppliers to optimize for cost, time-to-market, and more.
- Analyze Root Cause Across Multi-Party Processes: The new risk impact analysis capability performs multi-party root cause analysis to identify issues and alternate suppliers and carriers to mitigate issues and improve resiliency.
- Support Alternate Vendor Selection: The dynamic order schedule management capability allows alternative vendor selection based on established contractual and component requirements for faster pivots, allowing retailers and manufacturers to address cost, time to market, and supply availability considerations.
Optimize Returns To Get Goods Back Into Inventory Faster
With the latest release, retailers can empower a circular supply chain that reduces waste and increases profits:
- Gain Control Over Returns and Refund Decisions: With the ability to tailor returns processes based on data such as product SKU, returns reason or customer profile, retailers can decide to issue refunds while excluding items, even in grouped orders, that are cost-prohibitive to return. They can do this without requiring the customer to return the item when it is unsellable or when the cost of return exceeds resale value to improve overall profitability.
- Increase Visibility With Analytics and Reporting Capabilities: The addition of returns analytics and customizable reporting in Blue Yonder Returns Management provides insights into frequently returned items, returns reasons, customers with high returns rates, volumes, and more to improve inventory management, inform future buying decisions, and stop revenue leakage.
- Improve Inventory Recovery: The introduction of the Warehouse Processing app offers new and enhanced grading functionality that enables retailers and logistics service providers (LSPs) to customize quality check instructions for warehouse workers, using data to determine the optimal disposition outcome. This ultimately leads to more consistent decision-making, increased inventory resale, and enhanced revenue recovery while minimizing waste.
- Dynamic Grading for Resale: Automatically determine the quality of returned goods — and whether they should be restocked, resold, or removed — to minimize return losses, and get goods back into sales inventory sooner.
Enhanced Capabilities That Promote Sustainable Abundance
Blue Yonder also introduced a new sustainability offering, called Sustainable Supply Chain Manager, which integrates carbon and waste management with supply chain management. This new integration will help Blue Yonder customers reduce waste and pollution while cutting costs – a win-win for the business and the environment.
“Over the past few years, businesses have been able to scale global supply chains through technology; however, this progress has come at a cost to the environment as supply chains today account for most of global carbon emissions,” said Saskia van Gendt, chief sustainability officer, Blue Yonder. “The good news is that this same technology can be used to address sustainability impacts in the supply chain. We’re excited by our new offering that provides actionable data and optimization capabilities to address emissions and waste in the supply chain, helping businesses meet their sustainability goals.”
Blue Yonder’s Sustainable Supply Chain Manager allows customers to:
- Measure carbon emissions and proactively plan: The new Sustainable Supply Chain Manager solution embeds high-fidelity carbon emissions measurement into Blue Yonder’s transportation management and supply chain planning solutions. Customers can calculate multimodal emissions across all transport modes, including air, inland (e.g., truck, rail, barges), and sea, as well as logistics hubs that align with the Global Logistics Emission Council (GLEC) framework, and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14083 (Greenhouse gases). This solution enhances proactive retail and manufacturing planning to reduce emissions by streamlining and providing accurate emissions data for regulatory compliance and ESG reporting without manual and fragmented data collection, saving time and costs.
- Optimize transportation carbon emissions scenario modeling: Blue Yonder’s transportation management solution will now feature scenario modeling for carbon emissions optimization and trade-off analysis. This enhancement enables proactive planning and forecasting, driving progress on sustainability goals, reducing fuel usage and costs, and enhancing operational efficiency.
In addition, as previously announced, Blue Yonder acquired the business of Pledge Earth Technologies Ltd. (“Pledge”), which will enhance its already robust platform to include globally accredited logistics CO2e emissions reporting that allows customers to monitor their own emissions and those of their trading partners and suppliers. Learn more here.
Blue Yonder Launches Supply Chain Advisory
Also, at ICON, Blue Yonder unveiled its newly formed Supply Chain Advisory, which offers deep industry solutions and data science expertise to guide customers through their digital transformation journeys and adoption of Blue Yonder’s solutions and AI agents.
The Supply Chain Advisory helps customers cut through supply chain complexity, tackle tough challenges, avoid potential missteps, and keep ahead of what’s next. The team engages customers from the beginning of their project via workshops to guide their digital transformation and remains a strategic advisor throughout their entire lifecycle. The team signifies the next phase in Blue Yonder’s Customer Experience strategy, engaging in close collaboration with the implementation team, Customer Success, and partners to advance customer success.
The Supply Chain Advisory will help customers at every stage of their adoption of Blue Yonder’s solutions, including offering transformation blueprints and guidance on change management. An Agent Activation Advisory will work closely with customers to develop AI agents that help them unlock even greater value from their Blue Yonder solutions.
«We understand the growing complexity of modern supply chains and the transformative potential of AI,” said Andrea Morgan Vandome, chief innovation officer, Blue Yonder. “Our customers look to Blue Yonder as a trusted advisor to navigate tough challenges and identify opportunities. The Supply Chain Advisory is here to help them embrace innovation and rethink how work is done, ensuring they achieve their vision with the guidance of experienced professionals.»
Additional Resources:
- Learn more about Blue Yonder’s latest product release here
- Learn more about Blue Yonder’s recent acquisition of Pledge’s sustainability capabilities here
About Blue Yonder
Blue Yonder is the world leader in end-to-end digital supply chain transformation. With a unified, AI-driven platform and multi-tier network, Blue Yonder empowers businesses to operate sustainably, scale profitably, and delight their customers — all at machine speed. Blue Yonder’s modern supply chain innovations and unmatched industry expertise help more than 3,000 retailers, manufacturers, and logistics service providers to confidently navigate supply chain complexity and disruption. blueyonder.com
“Blue Yonder” is a trademark or registered trademark of Blue Yonder Group, Inc. Any trade, product or service name referenced in this document using the name “Blue Yonder” is a trademark and/or property of Blue Yonder Group, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.
Contacts
Blue Yonder Corporate Communications:
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EMEA: +39 335 7849149
