Yesterday, Blue Yonder CEO Duncan Angove opened ICON 2025 by introducing a ground-breaking new era in supply chain management.
Day two in Nashville saw Wayne Usie, Blue Yonder’s EVP & Chief Strategy Officer, build on yesterday’s excitement by giving us a deeper look into Cognitive Solutions and unveil brand new Blue Yonder products.
Cognitive Solutions: speed and precision together
The new Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions aren’t just designed to go fast, Wayne explains. They are about being precise in how you react and how you respond to uncertainty, which is essential in the ever-changing supply chain landscape.
But more than that, they mirror our own decision-making – a feat made possible by implementing a SADA (See, Analyze, Decide, Act) Loop within the solutions.
- Cognitive Solutions can SEE and anticipate events and their implications in real-time. Blue Yonder has the only unified data model across planning, transportation, and warehouse management in the supply chain industry. The Blue Yonder network includes over 1,600 TMS carriers and extends across multiple enterprises and tiers in a supply chain, creating a single source of truth across planning and execution and across multiple parties and tiers.
- With full visibility, the Cognitive Solutions then ANALYZE. Using a knowledge graph co-processor technology, the solutions can rapidly identify exceptions across the supply chain, and search for potential root causes 10- 30 times quicker, more precisely, and more efficiently than traditional methods.
- Using complete, accurate, and up-to-date data, Cognitive Solutions can DECIDE, running and comparing dozens of scenarios simultaneously. The decision-making process isn’t just precise and fast; for the first time ever, every decision can be made in the context of every other decision, across your entire business.
- Finally, the Cognitive Solutions can ACT, automating processes in a collaborative environment where humans, machines, and AI agents work together to respond to disruptions within minutes.
“Cognitive Solutions are not just on the same platform and connected – they are conscious. They share one brain, one data model, and always have the most up-to-date information.”
Wayne Usie, Blue Yonder EVP & Chief Strategy Officer
Proving the true practical power of Cognitive Solutions
Is there a better way to prove the true power of the Cognitive end-to-end Cognitive Solutions than to prove how they work across the entire supply chain?
Chief Product Officer, Gurdip Singh, joined Wayne on the mainstage to demonstrate the power of Cognitive Solutions from planning to warehouse, running through real scenarios every step of the way.
For example, in the planning phase, Gurdip discussed a disruption with a raw material supplier:
- The exact moment a disruption happens with the Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions, the planner will instantly get a notification on their mobile device and their desktop dashboard.
- At the same time, their AI agent teammate escalates the disruption to the demand and supply planning Cognitive Solutions, finds the pertinent root cause, potential resolution options, and even recommends which option to consider.
- Once a decision is made, the planners can precisely reschedule the existing warehouse delivery appointments, ensuring all the required raw materials arrive together and on time.
- Disruptions that used to take days or weeks to resolve are now handled in minutes. That’s the real power of Cognitive Solutions.
As well as demonstrating the power of Cognitive Solutions across planning and transportation, Wayne and Gurdip also announced a highly anticipated ‘Always-on’ Warehouse Solution that was promised during last year’s ICON.
With the new Cognitive Solutions for the warehouse, Blue Yonder can optimize order streaming, dock scheduling, and much more using predictive and generative machine-learning technology.
Reimagining retail and returns with Cognitive Solutions
Continuing on the supply chain journey, Wayne was joined by Chief Innovation Officer, Andrea Morgan-Vandome, to discuss how Blue Yonder has completely reimagined how products are delivered to stores and consumers.
The core of which is omni-inventory and omni-demand. Omni-inventory is about using all your inventory, across all channels and right back to your suppliers, to serve customers better, run operations more efficiently, and use the insights from those operations to plan smarter.
Omni-demand deciphers true customer intent, generating forecasts based on buying signals across every channel, fulfillment method, and shopping journey, providing a holistic view of demand and inventory.
Using these principals, Andrea discussed how the Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions have changed the game in retail and returns, including:
- Removing manual processes such as pivot tables and what-if scenarios in retail planning, as Cognitive Solutions already have a plan that connects pre-season and in-season planning, understands trends, risks, and opportunities, and adjusts in real time.
- Making collaboration seamless with merchandise, assortment, inventory, and materials are all in one place. What’s more, all suppliers and carriers are all on the same network.
- Unified allocation and replenishment to accurately deploy inventory, and see all inventory flowing into and from the distribution centers, regardless of whether it’s allocated or replenished.
- Incentivize preferred return behaviors like in-store returns for speed and efficiency, while streamlining the entire consumer process through branded returns pages and network of self-service drop-off kiosks that have a 93% satisfaction rate across over 50 million returns.
- Using real-time return data to fuel intelligent planning, forecasting, and inventory management, so you know when to expect returns and thus use them as a sourcing option.
“In today’s retail environment, clarity and speed are everything.”
Andrea Morgan-Vandome, Blue Yonder Chief Innovation Officer
From ICON to your supply chain
As day 2 at ICON draws to a close, the spotlight now shifts to how you are going to use these insights to power your own supply chain transformation.
