This blog was co-written by Matt Getman, Senior Product Director, and Angela Troccoli, Senior Product Marketing Director.

Supply chain planning has undergone significant evolution in recent years, largely due to advancement in technology, access to vast amounts of data and changing consumer behavior. With the rise of big data, leading-edge analytics and machine learning algorithms, businesses can now tap into enormous amounts of data and leverage more informed, predictive insights to optimize planning and decision-making – with greater scale and speed than ever before. As technology continues to advance, planning is likely to become even more sophisticated, enabling businesses to navigate the complexities of the global market with greater precision and agility.

In this blog post, we dive into the cutting-edge innovation happening at Blue Yonder to reshape the supply chain planning technology landscape. Representing the culmination of 40+ years of experience and intellectual leadership joined together with the latest in cloud-based performance, Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning suite of microservices represents that next major evolution of planning software and decision support tools. A fully end-to-end planning system, it is a true multi-tenant, cloud-native, fully SaaS solution that enables enterprises to scale decisions in real-time.

Powered by leading-edge technologies, the cognitive planning suite of solutions is an architectural leap forward in the industry.

All Your Planning Data on a Single Data Cloud, Powered by Snowflake

Supply chains create enormous amounts of data and, if you want your supply chain to be agile and responsive to real-world market dynamics, they must also consume enormous amounts of data from many different sources.

As one of the first and only enterprise supply chain software companies building applications to natively run on the Snowflake data cloud, Blue Yonder brings together enterprise-wide and third-party data into a single data cloud, then logically maps the data to a single semantic data model. This single source of data is leveraged across all planning solutions, making it faster and easier to bring together disparate factors into centralized decisioning and action. And because Blue Yonder’s cognitive solutions run natively on the common data cloud, applications get the access they need to run optimally.

Distributed architecture enables customers to scale up processing power faster while maintaining complete control over data usage and visibility. By bringing the applications to the data, processing time for extraction and write back is eliminated. Because data stays in a common data lake, data movement and latency are significantly reduced. And data sharing across Snowflake data clouds is as simple as granting read access, mitigating the need for managing integrations to external business applications.

Blue Yonder is also leveraging the power of Snowflake’s “zero copy clone” capabilities to reimagine scenario planning with our Polytope Analysis capability. By making multiple copies of existing data within the same common data cloud, customers are empowered to run hundreds of scenarios in parallel faster and more effectively because no incremental storage is required.

Delivering Next Generation Supply Chain Intelligence With Generative AI

Blue Yonder is bringing industry-leading generative AI technology, joining the natural language capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and depth of Blue Yonder’s supply chain IP, to deliver dynamic decision-making and orchestration. Integrated within the Luminate® Platform and embedded into all cognitive planning services, Blue Yonder Orchestrator empowers users to query in everyday language, then pulls data from all relevant and permitted sources and serves up information in an easy-to-consume format along with predictive insights and guided recommendations.

With simple, straightforward questions inputted via keyboard or voice, planners can complete business intelligence tasks, get advanced training, learn about their data model, and even activate complex workflows without leaving their day-in-the-life process or toggling between applications. Trained on Blue Yonder’s proprietary algorithms, patented IP, deep industry knowledge and the experience obtained through the operation of thousands of supply chains, Blue Yonder’s Orchestrator becomes an instant force-multiplier for planners. Not only can they use Orchestrator to answer straightforward questions, but they can bring to bear an entire army of virtual planners to run scenarios, freeing them to analyze and make decisions.

Unleashing the Power of Machine Learning With Deep Meta Learning

Blue Yonder has embedded industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimize the way customers predict, make decisions, and interact with Blue Yonder’s applications. We can spin up unconstrained computing power and scalability to run hundreds or even thousands of simulations in minutes without compromising accuracy, dramatically collapsing the time horizon between planning and execution. The result: an incredibly smart, fast, agile, and responsive supply chain.

We’re now taking this to the next level with a breakthrough enhancement to our ML forecasting algorithms — deep meta learning. This function will automatically learn what and how to train itself on customer data to improve forecast quality. By learning which features and interactions make sense in the data and on which level(s) they should be learned, the model automatically creates highly individualized model configurations. This will eliminate the need for time-consuming, manual feature-creation, resulting in 5-10% improvement in forecast quality when compared to Blue Yonder’s traditional ML models. With deep meta learning, planners will finally be empowered to capture the complete value of unlimited data and unlock the speed of integrated ML. 

Accelerate Time To Value While Reducing Total Cost of Ownership

The cognitive planning suite of microservices offers unparalleled control and adaptability to align with customers’ business processes. Easily add data, your custom ML models or extend Blue Yonder’s ML to suit your business’s needs. Tools like Manage the Data Model give users direct access to the Blue Yonder Data Model. With a couple of clicks a user can add columns to the data schema, create data elements, and prepare those elements for use in-tool. Once data is created, users can configure all aspects of product hierarchy, calendar and data elements in one place — the Semantic Network Architect (SNA). With the data model in place and managed, workflows and views are fully configurable using the Configuration Manager. Unlock decision-making speed with upgrade-proof views that perfectly track and support processes.

Blue Yonder also empowers customers to make our ML their own, with integrated tools to extend, test and deploy custom models at production scale. And we make it easy with no-code, low-code, and pro-code options, so while developers love it, you don’t have to be an experienced data scientist to use it. Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning applications are cloud-native, multi-tenant microservices, so they can be deployed in months — not years — without the heavy lift or expensive maintenance. And because Blue Yonder’s microservices interoperate with existing Blue Yonder solutions, you can make changes at your pace and priority without impacting existing investments.   

Blue Yonder’s new suite of cognitive planning solutions has leapfrogged existing technology, combining cutting-edge technology, Blue Yonder’s patented IP, and the industry-proven power of supply chain solvers to help customers revolutionize their supply chain planning.

To learn more about how Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning solutions can take your supply chain to the next level of performance, read our new e-book.