To maximize customer satisfaction, large-scale manufacturers, such as car and truck makers, need to optimize lead times and delivery reliability. But today’s volatile supply chain landscape — characterized by sudden demand swings, as well as materials shortages and other disruptions — means they must also enable resiliency and operate flexibly. In both production and transportation, manufacturers need to replan profitably and quickly as conditions change. Manufacturers also need to offer personalized products to meet growing market demand, while controlling costs. Again, resiliency and operational flexibility is the key.

Manufacturers Face Tough Challenges

The problem is that many large-scale manufacturing supply chains aren’t built for flexibility. Most rely on static planning processes and cycles which leads to latency and higher total cost of ownership, driven by outdated systems and organizational structures. Even if manufacturers begin to build new processes to plan and replan on the fly, their chances for success are limited — because they lack a common end-to-end platform, advanced technology, agile workflows, and real-time, cross-functional connectivity needed to bring this vision to life. As they try to reconcile their traditional planning approach to today’s dynamic environment, manufacturers face these questions:

  • How can we sense disruptions earlier, and pivot strategically?
  • Is it possible to continuously adjust production and transportation capacity?
  • How can we deliver personalized products profitably, at scale?
  • Are we making the best use of all our data?
  • What advanced technologies and best practices can help us?

Blue Yonder and flexis to the Rescue

With its acquisition of flexis — a flexible, innovative software provider specializing in production and transportation optimization — Blue Yonder now offers the end-to-end automotive and industrial capabilities to answer these challenges. Car and truck makers, as well as other large-scale manufacturers, now have easy, cost-effective “one stop” access to advanced software that adds value throughout the full cycle of planning and execution. Blue Yonder’s new offerings include industry-leading, advanced planning and scheduling — with modules for order slotting, order sequencing and detailed scheduling — as well as readily available sales and operations planning, transportation planning and transportation scheduling. Manufacturers can now entirely rely on Blue Yonder’s advanced capabilities to dynamically manage disruptions, constraints and changing conditions at both the strategic and tactical level.

Critical Capabilities for the Automotive Industry

Process automation and digitalization

Blue Yonder solutions automate and digitalize standard planning and execution workflows to make them more transparent and dynamic. Explainable artificial intelligence (AI) helps planners predict and visualize the effects of different production and transportation plans, based on various horizons and parameters. Advanced flexis technology, now part of Blue Yonder, helps manufacturers navigate today’s extremely complex, volatile landscape with greater speed, accuracy, agility, and responsiveness. These solutions also minimize manual effort and creates real-time connectivity across functions.   

Smarter, more forward-looking capacity planning

Instead of remaining stuck in static planning cycles — and churning out slightly adjusted forecasts every year — planners can leverage flexis, now part of Blue Yonder, to create smart, flexible production and transportation plans that respond to real-time data. Powerful analytics and algorithms within the solutions are designed to accurately analyze each asset’s capacity relative to likely demand, then automatically identify the optimal production or transportation plan. 

Improved visibility for production scheduling

Optimizing production schedules requires a high degree of accuracy in slotting and sequencing — which can be nearly impossible to achieve via manual analysis. The newly acquired solutions use advanced technology and AI to determine the optimal production schedule to stabilize the supply chain, reduce lead times, maximize throughput, reduce rework, smooth disruptions, and optimize set-up. In seconds, it ingests huge volumes of data, performs analysis, weighs tradeoffs, and delivers an optimal production schedule. And that schedule is continuously updated as conditions change.

Rapid, low-cost implementation — and seamless integration

Blue Yonder’s microservices-based, modular approach makes it fast and easy to get the newly acquired advanced planning and scheduling solutions up and running on the same platform that hosts other Blue Yonder solutions commonly used by manufacturers — including sales and operations planning, order fulfillment and forecasting, labor management, logistics management, and warehouse management. Built using “plug and play” application programming interfaces (APIs), cloud-native solutions can be easily added to the existing technology stack, minimizing implementation time, costs, and the use of internal IT resources.

Key Benefits

  • Increased productivity and asset utilization
  • Greater operational stability
  • Improved product personalization
  • Reduced capital investments
  • Lower resource costs
  • Decreased transportation costs
  • Lower IT investments

Watch this video to learn more about how Blue Yonder and flexis are joining forces to combat today’s automotive and industrial challenges.