Innovation on Functionality to Help Optimize our Customers’ Supply Chain Performance is Our Ongoing Directions

Nucleus Research (Nucleus) recently published its inaugural Transportation Technology Value Matrix 2023 report, which provides an overview of the current market for transportation management solutions and assesses the software providers in this space. Blue Yonder was named a Leader in this inaugural report, based on an evaluation of Blue Yonder’s Transportation Management System (TMS).

Customer-Centricity Is Vital

This report assesses the market based on how vendors deliver value to customers through the usability and functionality of their TMS solutions. Blue Yonder agrees with Nucleus’ market assessment that because of the rise in e-commerce and digital technologies, customer expectations are at a different level in terms of delivery performance and visibility.

To enable manufacturers, retailers, and third-party logistics (3PL) companies to improve supply chain visibility and operational performance, Blue Yonder has placed a focus on continuing to innovate and perfect our transportation management capabilities, as well as the broader supply chain execution functionality.

In his analysis of Blue Yonder’s capabilities, author Charles Brennan, Research Analyst at Nucleus Research, mentioned, “Blue Yonder’s Transportation solution provides planning and optimization capabilities across all modes and leverages real-time visibility and machine learning to generate insights for carrier performance, transit time prediction, and load failure predictions. The TMS solution supports optimization and execution capabilities across private and dedicated fleet management, common carrier plans, and dynamic intercontinental planning to help organizations streamline first to last-mile delivery.”

Functionality to Enable Transformative Improvement

Blue Yonder attributes our position as a Leader to our ability to understand markets across a wide variety of industries and customer segments, emphasis on innovation, and global implementation partner network that helps on large scale and complex projects, among other criteria.

This placement is also made possible because of the ability to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journeys. In addition to the capabilities mentioned by Charles Brennan above, the dynamic and highly scalable capabilities to handle increasing operational complexity help provide critical efficiency, profitability, and sustainability improvement for these transformations. For example, as Charles Brennan mentioned in the report, “With Blue Yonder TMS, organizations can reschedule the movement of assets at the execution level, split orders, and automate workflow management, allowing retailers, manufacturers, and distributors to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and minimize the usage of miles and driver hours.”

Key Areas of Innovations

Our customers are looking to improve service levels, time-to-value, and cost-to-serve, as they are modifying their supply chain footprints to fit the changing market. In response, Blue Yonder is bringing innovative capabilities to support their transformation journey, including:

  • Carrier network and marketplace solutions for optimizing fleets and leveraging of common carriers and parcel carriers.
  • Transportation modeling that creates very realistic and highly optimized scenarios as customers’ supply chain footprints is changing to fit customer-centric requirements.
  • Optimization and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities for routing, transit time, palletization, and sustainability improvements, as well as predictive ETA/PTA, carrier risk and transportation performance analytics.
  • Prescriptive resolution recommendations that enable pre-defined workflow resolution for some of the most common load plan editing tasks, including underutilized load efficiency and scheduling failures.
  • Integrated forecasting and replenishment capabilities properly determine and predict both carrier resource and fleet forecasted needs in advance, for ease of right-sizing fleet capacity and securing capacity from third-party carriers.
  • Loading building, which is integrated to Blue Yonder’s Supply Chain Planning solutions, enables pre-defined replenishment plans and returns transportation constraint-aware adjustments for order consolidation and vehicle load plans.
  • Updates to Blue Yonder Portal Planner UX Moder Experience that improves the simplicity paradigm for load planner visibility to KPIs and load plan adjustments, increasing time to resolution and improving customer service and cost.
  • Fleet Management enhancements that enable WMS Operators to have TMS functions to split order quantities if splitting is an allowable operation, to split quantities into loadable sub-quantities based on the product characteristics and packaging.

Innovation Separates the Leaders from the Followers

What’s the key takeaway from the Nucleus Transportation Technology Value Matrix 2023? The leaders in the matrix are those providers who monitor market needs and respond with value-added functionality and usability. At Blue Yonder, we continue to innovate to ensure our TMS solution meets the needs the of our customers as their business requirements change/evolve.

Every day at Blue Yonder, we engage with our customers to help them innovate their supply chain operations in order to maintain leadership in a marketplace that is increasingly challenging. As an acknowledged leader in transportation management and other supply chain solution areas, we are focusing on breakthrough innovations. Thanks to this report, a number of our key recent developments were highlighted. We will continue to provide exciting updates to Nucleus and its clients.

To learn why our customers’ digital journey greatly benefits from our TMS, visit Blue Yonder’s Transportation Management solution page and review our Transportation e-book.