Blue Yonder launches AI-Powered luminate planning solutions dedicated to optimising for the ‘new normal’

With a focus on using artificial intelligence (AI)/ machine learning (ML) to better predict demand and improve companies operations from end-to-end, Blue Yonder Holding, Inc. (Blue Yonder), has launched its reimagined Luminate Planning portfolio.

This powerful set of solutions enables boundaryless planning providing customers with integrated sales and operations execution (S&OE); limitless, always-on planning; and an intelligence engine that can predict and pivot to deliver an autonomous supply chain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated long-held issues in supply chain management. Global disruption, channel complexity, trade and tariff concerns, regional sourcing, SKU rationalisation, and supply chain skill shortages are all affecting the new normal for supply chain planners. 

To address these issues, Luminate Planning leverages ML and AI to continuously provide insights into a customer’s supply chain allowing it to become a powerful, boundaryless end-to-end automation loop that is more intelligent, responsive and agile. 

“As we continue to work closely with our customers through a very difficult time, it’s becoming clear that industry leaders need integrated planning, visibility and orchestration to fully optimise their supply chain. Blue Yonder is committed to helping its customers manage through these times and beyond,” said Desikan Madhavanur, executive vice president and chief development officer, Blue Yonder. “These powerful new capabilities within Luminate Planning enable our customers to access end-to-end planning capabilities, minimize risk and deliver resiliency with confidence, ensuring that supplies are getting to the people who need them in the most profitable and automated way possible.”

Blue Yonder’s Luminate Planning portfolio includes: 

• Reimagined User Experience: offers a new user experience that is personalized to each customer and is collaborative, workflow-based and prescriptive.
• Boundaryless Always-on Planning: pulls in real-time data from suppliers, factories, distributors, retailers, customers and news, events and weather; bridges conventional time and organizational silos; and closes the gaps between demand and supply planning, the upstream and downstream supply chain, and Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) and S&OE.
• Pervasive, AI-powered Intelligence to Predict and Pivot in Real-time: provides predictive demand forecasts based on ML, disruption prediction, automated problem resolution, and dynamic segmentation.
• Integrated Supply Chain Planning and Execution from End-to-End: allows for the visualization and orchestration of the end-to-end flow of goods and automates short-term problem resolution in an S&OE timeframe so planners can focus on the strategic mid-to-long term horizon. 
   Customers such as Mahindra & Mahindra and others are already leveraging these powerful new capabilities.

"Mahindra & Mahindra is constantly evaluating scientific methods to tweak demand forecasting, inventory management, and replenishment planning strategies for its spare parts, in order to simultaneously extract supply chain efficiencies and maximise customer service,” said Aniruddh Srivastava, head, supply chain planning, for Mahindra & Mahindra’s Spares Business Unit. “Demand segmentation is the cornerstone of Mahindra & Mahindra spare parts strategy – integrating demand, inventory and replenishment strategies within a unified supply chain planning framework.

Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform applies ML algorithms to both systematically classify spare parts into unique demand clusters and establish significance of demand attributes, resulting in incremental value-add from further fine-tuning of assigned service levels and associated inventory costs.”

Simon Ellis, program vice president, supply chain strategies, for IDC Manufacturing Insights, says: “The impact of COVID-19 has exposed current limitations in conventional supply chain management, not just the lack of true end-to-end integration from planning through logistics, but also the lack of integration between S&OP and S&OE. With its Luminate Planning solutions and extensive industry experience, Blue Yonder is among the suppliers well positioned to address these critical challenges with end-to-end solutions that span from AI-infused demand planning to master planning, across transportation and logistics.”