In October 2024, a team from Blue Yonder attended the automotiveIT Kongress, held at the Vienna House Andel’s Berlin. The largest industry gathering of automotive and IT professionals in Germany, the automotiveIT Kongress featured lectures, panel discussions, best practices, deep-dive sessions, an awards presentation, and extensive networking opportunities with industry experts.

It’s no secret that the global automotive industry is in a state of transformation, as electrification, autonomy and connectivity emerge as competitive imperatives. The annual automotiveIT Kongress uniquely focuses on “business” or supply chain IT, along with “product” IT.

The primary focus areas of the event covered SmartFactory. It explored how the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can boost efficiency and adaptability in automotive manufacturing. The event also focused on big data, data management and the future of the data-driven automotive industry, from production processes to customer relationship management.

Blue Yonder makes it easy for automotive manufacturers to tackle these technology- and data-related challenges head-on. Our strategy of supporting our customers on a “composable journey” aims to streamline technology deployment and tailor capabilities to meet each manufacturer’s unique business requirements.

Blue Yonder’s microservices-based architecture includes unprecedented end-to-end capabilities for volume planning, feature and mix planning, forecast order generation, parts requirements planning, order slotting and sequencing, configure-to-order, transportation capacity planning, and logistics fulfillment. It simplifies the IT infrastructure, reduces TCO (total cost of ownership), enhances interoperability across various functions and systems, and unlocks new capabilities — making the supply chain more intelligent, agile and responsive to change. 

Achieving predictable production in unpredictable conditions

Within its ecosystem of composable microservices, Blue Yonder has proven capabilities that optimize production planning, an area where the world’s automakers face significant challenges. 

Demand variability, the need for customization at scale, and the shift from internal combustion engines to hybrid and electric vehicles — all these forces have converged to make the demand forecast a constantly moving target. But automakers also face material shortages, rising operations costs, geo-political conflicts, and other challenges that interfere with their ability to deliver vehicles reliably and profitably.

Today’s unpredictable business environment seems directly at odds with automakers’ need for production precision, control and predictability — best exemplified by the “pearl chain” approach. The traditional goal of vehicles manufacturers has been to carefully orchestrate the end-to-end manufacturing process to balance and stabilize production. That means accurately sequencing individual orders, and the needed parts, so that final assembly can occur fluidly and seamlessly. By ensuring a consistent, stable flow of orders, automakers can maximize the efficiency, utilization and profitability of all their production lines.

While it seems impossible to achieve this level of certainty and control in today’s uncertain industry landscape, the great news is that — as with so many other automotive challenges — advanced technology provides an answer.

At the automotiveIT Kongress, we were excited to share Blue Yonder’s expanded capabilities for flexible production planning, enabled by AI. With our recent acquisition of flexis, these capabilities have grown. Today automakers can easily add cloud-native, plug-and-play production planning software from Blue Yonder to their existing platform strategy — minimizing implementation time, costs and the use of internal IT resources.

Precision meets flexibility: The value of Blue Yonder

How does Blue Yonder combine real-time, dynamic production planning with the precision of the pearl chain? Instead of churning out slightly adjusted forecasts on an annual basis, Blue Yonder software drives the generation of intelligent, flexible production plans that are continuously updated in response to real-time data.

The Blue Yonder Platform delivers advanced planning and scheduling (APS) capabilities, with microservices for order slotting, order sequencing and detailed scheduling. Enabled by AI, Blue Yonder optimization engines ingest huge volumes of real-time data, perform analysis, weigh tradeoffs, and deliver an optimal production schedule. And that schedule is easily replanned as conditions change.

In planning production, Blue Yonder considers order attributes, product configurations, plant capabilities, production requirements, and a large library of constraints that can be configured to each manufacturer’s specific production environment. Blue Yonder software automates and digitalizes planning and execution workflows to make them more transparent and dynamic. Explainable AI helps planners predict and visualize the effects of different schedules and sequences, based on various horizons and parameters.

Blue Yonder supports the precision of the pearl chain by ensuring that well-orchestrated component production leads to seamless final assembly — no matter how many disruptions or surprises occur along the way. Blue Yonder APS capabilities are purpose-built to smooth and balance production, maximizing cost control, asset utilization and customer service. Since disruptions are only becoming more commonplace, Blue Yonder supports a practical, fast way to resolve them.

Mastering upstream and downstream volatility

Automotive manufacturers are in a challenging position today, as they navigate volatility on both the demand and supply sides. In this environment, it’s critical to break down organizational siloes and share real-time information about changing conditions. This shared visibility and “single version of the truth” enable automakers to align sales and operations planning, sales and operations execution, production planning and logistics planning, for a cohesive end-to-end response.

Reach out to learn more about how Blue Yonder can help bring this vision to life, and drive more predictable results, via digitalization.