As an engineer, I tend to look at things differently. While most people would appreciate a product for what it is, I’m always curious how something is made or how it works. I want to take it apart and tinker with it. Although I admit I am not always good at putting it back together.

Panasonic’s recent acquisition of Blue Yonder has me excited; as I view it through my engineering lens, I see how together we will change the future of supply chain. Here are four important trends we see emerging that we will drive forward together:

  1. The supply chain industry is getting industrialized at a massive scale. What do I mean by industrialized? I mean supply chain is becoming common place in daily lives and in C-suite conversations. Thinking back to 10 years ago or even five, that was not the case. Supply chain today has become center stage for every organization, for both the consumer and the provider. We have seen this industrialization before when it comes to things like computers or smart phones. There was a time when very few people owned these devices but now you will find a computer in almost every home and a smart phone in every hand. These products have now become industrialized. Combining the scalability of Panasonic and the industry-leading solutions of Blue Yonder will only help us scale to meet this industrialization.
  • The “Power of Three” will be critical in this industrialization journey. The “Power of Three” refers to the coming together of Edge, Cloud and AI/ML elements. These three elements are critical for accelerating our shared Autonomous Supply Chain™ vision, a ‘moonshot’ we introduced three years ago. The three elements will help companies overcome the volatility, uncertainty and complexity that we are seeing as a result of disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal blockage. The three elements will also help companies meet the acceleration of e-commerce brought on by the pandemic. Blue Yonder has been helping its customers in their journey to cloud and in their journey to automation (AI/ML). Now, combining Panasonic’s Edge capabilities with our Cloud and AI/ML capabilities will accelerate our customers journey to the autonomous supply chain edge of the future.
  • Supply chain competitiveness and responsiveness is rapidly moving to the frontlines. Supply chain is no longer just managed by executives but also those working the frontlines at factories, warehouses, and distribution centers – even those operating vehicles (think truck drivers). These workers are critical to the success of the supply chain and need powerful, intelligent tools to guide them on their daily journeys. This is the essence of Panasonic Connected Solutions Company’s Gemba Process Innovation which loosely translates to ‘the place where value is created’ and we are excited to empower the supply chain frontlines together by building location and resource aware solutions.
  • Real-time visibility and orchestration is no longer a need but a necessity in post-pandemic supply chains to meet consumer demand and manage profitability. Control tower solutions can help but are not helpful if they don’t offer AI/ML and cloud computing capabilities to hone, harvest and make sense out of the massive data. Today, companies need to integrate commerce-logistics-planning with a control tower visibility overlay strongly powered by a frontline-aware supply chain. With Blue Yonder and Panasonic coming together, our Luminate™ Control Tower, powered by Luminate Platform, will get a boost from Panasonic’s IoT hub technology to sense, analyze and develop events to trigger alerts and provide predictive analytics to orchestrate the entire supply chain. This is the foundation of an Autonomous Supply Chain and what Blue Yonder and Panasonic will offer together.

By joining with Panasonic Connected Solutions Company, Blue Yonder has a stronger advent-“edge” to define the next generation end-to-end connected supply chain solutions for retailers, manufacturers and 3PL companies.