Supply Chain Risk Is Inevitable. The Key Is Understanding and Mitigating It via AI.
Supply Chain Disruption In a series of blog articles, the Product/Solution Marketing team explores innovative solutions to guard against supply chain disruptions. Our personal and professional lives are filled with risk. Every day, we can take actions that mitigate that risk — or we can…
Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) Has Served Its Duty and Should Now Retire
Executive summary According to Gartner (2018 Gartner Sales & Operations Planning Success Survey), the most popular evaluation metric for forecasts in Sales and Operations Planning is Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). This needs to change. Modern forecasts concern small quantities on a disaggregated level such…
Forecasting Few Is Different, Part 2
This is a two-part story by Malte Tichy about dealing with sales forecasts that concern fast-moving as well as slow-moving items. Find Part 1 here. How precise can a sales forecast become? The mechanism of fluctuation cancellation ensures that granular low-scale-forecasts are more imprecise, noisy…
Forecasting Few Is Different, Part 1
When dealing with sales forecasts that concern fast-moving as well as slow-moving items, we must account for the non-proportional scaling of relative forecast uncertainty with selling rates, which largely determines the achievable level of precision. Executive summary For the same forecast quality, predictions for slow-moving…
Blue Yonder Named a Leader in WFM Technology
Workforce remains top of mind for business leaders because it’s become clear that there’s no end in sight for today’s labor challenges. There are more than 11 million job openings in the United States, and 35% of businesses are experiencing unsustainable turnover rates between 11%…
Three Keys for 4PL Success
This is part 2 of 3 article on the topic of “How 4PL Services Can Help Up the Game in the Omni-Channel World.” As I discussed in my last blog post, the pandemic has driven dramatic growth for fourth-party logistics (4PL) providers. As the world’s…
Managing the Supply Chain in Times of Crisis
As we watch Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfold, the real cost of this war is plain: lost lives, families that are forever altered, and destroyed communities. In her recent blog post, Anusha Shankar discussed this tragedy, as well as the need to help Blue Yonder…
Four Ways for Driving Agility with Integrated Demand & Supply Planning
Already in crisis, the world’s supply chains are facing additional obstacles in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Just as port congestion was beginning to clear, companies find themselves facing a new set of challenges, including product and materials shortages, blocked transportation lanes and…
Blue Yonder Can Deliver a 394% Return on Investment — Even in Challenging Times
Faced with port closures, supply roadblocks, labor shortages and shifting consumer behaviors, many companies have had to drastically change how they manage their supply chains and serve customers in the past two years. More organizations are discovering the power of advanced technologies, powered by artificial…
You Should Not Always Have Known Better: Understand and Avoid the Hindsight Selection Bias in Probabilistic Forecast Evaluation
This blog post on forecast evaluation discusses common pitfalls and challenges that arise when evaluating probabilistic forecasts. Our aim is to equip Blue Yonder’s customers and anyone else interested with the knowledge required to setup and interpret evaluation metrics for reliably judging forecast quality. The…