Blue Yonder is committed to helping its customers face the unexpected. To provide insights into the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and its impact on supply chains around the world, we are delivering a blog series to help anyone looking for support and advice. Our experts, who have spent years in the supply chain industry, share their insights. 

In the “Mitigating the Impact of the Coronavirus on Supply Chains with Machine Learning and Real-Time Visibility” blog post earlier this month, we shared how our data science team is busy feeding data into Blue Yonder’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven control tower to help visualize and predict current and future impacts of COVID-19. As the pandemic continues to spread, the impact on people’s lives, and by extension, the hidden weaknesses in supply chains have become glaring.

Blue Yonder is committed to helping our customers minimize the impact on their global supply chains and ensuring critical supplies get to the people that need them the most. That’s why our team has developed multiple offerings to help our customers and non-customers effectively manage their end-to-end supply chain during these difficult times.

One such offering is COVID-19 Supply Chain Risk Response that provides a “war room” service for our customers in greatest need. It connects to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s live feed to receive daily data on the spread and impacts of COVID-19. This allows for real-time visibility and impacts of COVID-19 specific to a customer’s supply chain. We are also working with key partners like Microsoft – as noted in CEO Satya Nadella’s letter – to assist communities in receiving what they need during this pandemic.

With the COVID-19 Supply Chain Risk Response offer built on our Luminate Platform, we can superimpose a customer’s supply chain landscape over the COVID-19 spread to provide visibility to critical supply chain metrics and risk to answer key questions, such as:

  • How is COVID-19 affecting my supply chain?
  • How is COVID-19 affecting my transport reliability?
  • What are my possible supply chain risks?
  • What are the impacted sites?

Companies will also have the ability to:

  • Track inventory of finished goods and raw material in relation to COVID-19 activity.
  • Understand their customer’s demand and its relation to COVID-19 impacts globally.
  • Ability to drill into each region and get related impacts to prescriptively recommend action.

Our hope is this new solution will be of value to customers delivering medical equipment, protective face masks, medicine, food, and water to ensure supplies get to the people that need them the most.

While the Supply Chain Risk Response is quickly gaining usage, it is just one example of how we are working with our customers to minimize their supply chain disruptions and other ripple effects of this pandemic. These disruptions include how to handle store shutdowns and shifting labor resources to other stores, modeling the most efficient and effective transportation, ensuring warehouse tasks are prioritized by essential need, and how to assess sales impact of promotions to move pent up inventory.

We’ve also provided a variety of discussion forums for our customers to engage with their peers, ask questions of our experts and develop go-forward strategies to meet these extremely challenging times. And we have created a COVID-19 response center that includes information on how we can help you gain visibility and better manage the disruptions in your supply chain caused by the coronavirus.

For more information on this and other COVID-19 resources, please visit: blueyonder.com/covidresponse