It has become nearly impossible to predict changes in supply and demand patterns. On the supply side, there are increasingly frequent supply disruptions, part shortages and cost pressures. On the demand side, customer preferences remain volatile, and this is further exacerbated by the growing threat of inflation plus the rise in omni-channel. This not only hurts revenue, profit and customer satisfaction, but makes it difficult for organizations to achieve sustainability objectives of reducing waste.

As external and internal challenges have become more acute, new technologies have emerged to address them. The rise in platforms like Azure has accelerated the deployment of SaaS solutions. New data management strategies are changing the way businesses organize, structure and manage data. And the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has compelled many organizations to invest in new technology – with the goals of optimizing and automating business processes, driving better performance, and increasing profitability.  

Data Silos and Disjointed Point Solutions Are Making It Impossible To Achieve Desired Profitability or Resilience​

Advanced technologies, including AI and ML, hold the potential to revolutionize the world’s supply chains. By monitoring real-time conditions along the end-to-end supply chain and across the extended partner network, AI- and ML-enabled optimization engines can sense anomalies, project the results of various resolution strategies, and autonomously take corrective action. It’s not surprising that, by 2025, half of large enterprises will have deployed AI orchestration platforms, up from fewer than 10% in 2020.

Yet for many companies the promise of these advanced technologies is not being realized, despite their growing investments. In fact, it’s been reported that 85% of AI and ML projects fail to deliver their intended business outcomes. The primary reasons? A lack of strategic data management or a well-designed data infrastructure, and disjointed point solutions. Even with big investments in AI-powered point solutions, companies today are still relying on decades-old databases, offline algorithms, and systems that lack interoperability or easy data sharing.

Today, businesses have all the information they need to optimize their supply chains. But most companies are simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available data – from suppliers, customers, partners, and third-party sources. They also lack the infrastructure to collect it, harmonize it, analyze it and apply it to their everyday decisions. Instead, data is scattered across the extended supply chain in disparate point solutions. It’s not centralized, accessible or actionable.  It’s no longer enough to simply throw more resources at the problem. As data volume and velocity accelerate, businesses cannot possibly process all the necessary data amidst increasing market complexities.

Advanced technologies such as AI and ML depend on data for their success. Unless companies are equipped to digitally capture and apply real-time data on demand changes, inventory levels, product availability, and other key factors, their advanced supply chain solutions will never achieve their full potential.

Blue Yonder and Snowflake: Breaking Down Barriers to Data Access

Blue Yonder is partnering with Snowflake, the data cloud company, to address this challenge. Announced last year, this partnership enables every joint customer to access, share and consume live governed data, industry-specific datasets and data services at scale – without the latency, cost and effort required with technical integrations across applications or with traditional data marketplaces.

Snowflake delivers a single, fully managed, secure platform for multi-cloud data consolidation – with unified governance and elastic performance – that allows companies to break down data silos by ingesting and analyzing real-time insights from across the extended supply chain network, as well as third-party sources. Bringing together Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform and the Snowflake Data Cloud empowers joint customers with an end-to-end visibility into their supply chain for faster, more accurate and informed decision making. And Blue Yonder’s advanced solutions can easily ingest this data to facilitate upstream and downstream visibility, control and responsiveness across the entire supply chain in near real time.

Easily Share Data, Act on Insights, and Build a Better Network Around a Unified Data Source

Blue Yonder’s partnership with Snowflake gives joint customers centralized access to Snowflake’s data marketplace, empowering them to enhance their internal data with live, ready-to-query third-party data products – from commodity prices to weather patterns – resulting in more informed scenario planning and more accurate business decisions. Blue Yonder logically maps this data to a single semantic data model then transforms it into the desired format that can be easily consumed by cloud-native services. Data can stay where it is, applications get the access they need to run optimally, and users can collaborate across the supply chain ecosystem – including suppliers, customers and partners – resulting in truly synchronized supply chain management.

With Snowflake’s data collaboration capabilities, separate teams and solutions can operate together on the same data and build, train and continually refine AI and ML models with confidence to forecast demand, manage inventory, deliver products, manage exceptions, and accomplish other mission-critical tasks. External data sharing becomes as simple as one business simply granting access to another, reducing latency between trading partners, like suppliers and carriers, and enhancing coordination across the supply chain. This allows supply chains to collaborate, plan and execute in near real time while referencing a common data set. 

With Blue Yonder and Snowflake, joint customers reduce the cost, complexity and time required to transform data while enabling interoperability between applications and collaboration across clouds. Data storage costs, data movement and latency are all a thing of the past. Joint customers can finally strategically balance cost and service outcomes, based on an end-to-end, real-time supply chain perspective – earning the greatest possible return on their investments in AI, ML and other advanced technologies.

Data-Driven Insights Delivered With More Speed, Scale and Agility Than Ever Before

In today’s fast-paced, volatile supply chain environment, it seems impossible for companies to monitor every factor – upstream, downstream and external – that can impact their cost and service results. By bringing accurate, reliable, real-time data from across the supply chain ecosystem together with the power of Blue Yonder’s industry-leading supply chain solutions, joint customers can identify exceptions and instantly drive a fact-based, rapid response. They can orchestrate and synchronize the end-to-end supply chain, in near real-time, confident that they are making the most intelligent, data-driven decisions.

For the first time, joint customers can now easily leverage all the data they need to gain a full 360-degree view of the supply chain and extended network, as well as insights into the overall product journey and customer experience. Snowflake’s core competencies enable data storage, processing and analytic solutions that are faster, easier to use and far more flexible than traditional database offerings – making it easy for joint customers, and Blue Yonder’s solutions, to extract the insights they need.

Together, we are making it easier to access more real-world data, dramatically simplifying data transformation and sharing, and making data more actionable. In doing so, we’re helping businesses make higher quality decisions even faster, increase productivity and agility, optimize performance and profitability, and build more supply chain resilience. ​

To learn more:

  • Check out our solution sheet.
  • Watch the upcoming Blue Yonder Live on Oct. 5 at 12 p.m. ET here.
  • Contact us here.