Solving The World’s Supply Chain Woes
The high-tech solutions Blue Yonder is bringing to the problem that will support brands everywhere
If you break down the supply chain in its simplest form, basically what you have is brands procuring products and then delivering them to customers where and when they need them. Sounds easy, right? By now you know it’s not. We’ve heard countless testimonials about just how much the supply chain impacts a business, and we’ve seen reports on a number of challenges businesses have encountered thanks to supply chain disruptions. One thing they all had in common — there were no concrete answers to the problems the businesses were facing.
That changes now.
On Up Next in Commerce, we finally get some insight on the supply chain from a couple of guys from Blue Yonder, Omar Akilah, GVP of Product in the commerce suite, and Eugene Amigud, GVP of Product Management and Architecture. Blue Yonder is an end-to-end supply chain platform that enables companies to tackle all the problems in the supply chain. From planning to execution, to transportation management, to commerce, to orchestrating an order to where it needs to go, to promising a customer when they’re going to get it and making sure that you fulfill those promises, these are just some of the things Amigud and Akilah have insider knowledge of. The biggest insight they shared, though, was about what the key elements of the supply chain are and how each can be optimized in different ways depending on a company’s needs.
“There are definitely key pillars of the supply chain that need to be aligned,” Akilah said. “And all of our customers, I would say, are actively working on all of those pillars. Whether it’s inventory planning, inventory, placement, network modeling, the commerce experience, speed and convenience to their customers. Those are all common pillars that every company is trying to figure out …Do I have the right products in the right place, fast enough to meet the demand that I have when I have it? And am I engaging my customers the way that they want to be engaged and am I promising them what they’re going to get when they’re going to get it? all that kind of good stuff. So I think at the end of the day, the pillars are common. What happens, the uniqueness in the sauces is how do you address it for each customer?”
Every brand is unique, and every supply chain has its own hiccups and challenges. But there are still overarching truths that exist and best practices that have proven to work. Those are the things that companies come to Blue Yonder to figure out.
“We find a lot customers work with us not just to buy products,” Amigud said. “They say, ‘Bring the best practices, the lessons learned, what’s the fastest way to implement that? We all know somebody else’s doing ship from store, but how do you roll it out? Do you roll it out across all stores immediately? Do you pick a market where you offer some competitive differentiation?’ et cetera.”
So what are some of the trends and best practices they have seen? It’s all about speed, transparency, and implementing new, advanced technology.
“We talked about visibility, talked about machine learning, the part that is missing in all this equation and throughout the industry is the edge intelligence,” Akilah said. “So now if you can see when customers are walking into the store… and you can just scan the face and have an understanding of the mood of the customer, what recommendations and what offers are there, knowing where the items are in real time, not just saying that, yes, the PO is arriving 20 days from now, but actually having a sensor on that specific item and knowing that it’s going from China to maybe the west coast on the truck to Minneapolis somewhere. So with the edge data, machine learning and visibility and all this execution becomes on steroids.”
What will this ultimately mean for brands and the supply chain long-term? Tune into Up Next in Commerce to find out.
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