Blue Yonder Announces Winners of 2024 ICONic Customer Awards
May 14 2024 - 9:30AM
Business Wire
To honor its customers who are driving digital transformations
of their supply chains, Blue Yonder presented several leading
companies with the ICONic Customer Awards at the annual Blue Yonder
ICON conference on May 14, 2024, in Dallas.
The ICONic Customer Awards celebrate organizations and
individuals who are making a name for themselves by embracing
innovation, challenging the status quo, and delivering great
results. The awards acknowledge the success, impact, and results
that they are driving.
The winning companies for the 2024 ICONic Customer Awards
are:
- Retail Renaissance: Meijer and Woolworths
- This category celebrates retailers who have best leveraged Blue
Yonder solutions to drive the future of retail and meet the
changing demands of their customers. Winners have embraced the
power of technology to transform their retail operations, resulting
in improved efficiency, customer centricity, and
profitability.
- Supply Chain Planning Resiliency: Ingredion and Coca-Cola
Beverages Florida, LLC / CONA Services LLC
- This category recognizes companies who have demonstrated
resiliency through digital planning to solve the hardest problems
and uncover the most opportunity. Winners have leveraged Blue
Yonder’s end-to-end solutions to predict and pivot their supply
chain planning capabilities in order to deliver on their promise to
partners, suppliers, and – ultimately – customers.
- Execution Innovator: Alcon and ABINBEV
- This category honors the best use of innovation and Blue Yonder
technology to drive autonomous, sustainable, and predictive
logistics solutions. Winners are focused on next-generation ideas
that transform the future of how they are optimizing the flow of
goods around the globe and reacting to real-time changes in the
most efficient manner across first, middle and last mile.
- Supply Chain Sustainability: Arcadia Cold, LLC
- This category recognizes customers who are leading the charge
towards a more sustainable future. The winner has woven
sustainability into their operations using Blue Yonder’s solutions
to drive sustainable practices throughout their supply chain,
resulting in reduced waste, improved energy efficiency, and a
positive impact on the environment.
- Digital Disruptor: Micron Technology and Postobón
- This category honors customers who are pushing boundaries and
driving change across their organization. Using Blue Yonder
solutions, winners have achieved end-to-end transformation and
digital disruption. As a result, these companies drive quantifiable
impact, challenge traditional norms, and create new and innovative
ways of doing business that better meet the needs of their
customers and business.
- Innovation Visionary: Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT)
- This category recognizes a forward-thinking organization that
is blazing a trail of innovation by harnessing the latest Blue
Yonder solutions and cloud technologies. It celebrates pioneers and
harnessing what is possible with next generation cognitive supply
chains powered by cutting-edge AI and a unified data cloud.
“We are thrilled to recognize the ICONic results these companies
have achieved leveraging Blue Yonder solutions,” said Susan Beal,
chief customer officer, Blue Yonder. “Blue Yonder ICON is the
perfect place to share these success stories, so it is an honor to
once again feature our ICONic Customer Award winners at the event.
Congratulations to all of the winners! We are proud to work
alongside you and are thrilled with what our teams have
accomplished together.”
More About the Winners:
- ABINBEV: Our next award goes to Execution Innovator
ABINBEV. For years, ABINBEV has relied on the Blue Yonder
Transportation Management solution to orchestrate logistics across
its production plants, warehouses and suppliers. ABINBEV has
integrated the Transportation Management solution with the Blue
Yonder Fulfillment Planning and Load Builder solutions to
dynamically match weekly distribution plans with the right carrier
mix, freight rates, shipment schedule, routes and truck loading
plans. Utilizing this ecosystem of Blue Yonder solutions, ABINBEV
has reduced its number of light loads by over 80%, while improving
load efficiency by almost 10% during re-planning, which lead to
significant improvement in business KPIs such as service level,
shipper of choice, and touchless.
- Alcon: Congratulations to Alcon, a 2024 Execution
Innovator. Because Alcon’s eye care products are critical to
scheduled medical procedures around the world, guaranteed delivery
is mandatory. Alcon needed end-to-end visibility and real-time
tracking, from the supplier to the end customer. Several Blue
Yonder solutions — including Warehouse Management and
Transportation Management — have increased transparency, service
and sustainability by unifying data and standardizing processes.
Lead times have been reduced by 25% and freight costs have
decreased by 30%. And Alcon reports that it’s just getting
started.
- Arcadia Cold: Arcadia Cold specializes in providing
third-party handling, storage, distribution, and value-added
services to the food industry. Notably, Arcadia Cold added 200,000
pallet positions across five new, state-of-the-art energy-efficient
facilities in 2023. As it continues to grow its national network,
Arcadia Cold has teamed up with Blue Yonder Transportation
Management and Warehouse Management solutions to ensure it’s making
efficient and sustainable decisions. By design, every process
change takes environmental impacts into consideration. Through
optimizing routes, reducing energy consumption, minimizing
emissions, decreasing waste and enabling better space utilization,
Arcadia Cold is leading the cold chain industry in
sustainability.
- Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC and CONA Services LLC:
Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC (Coke Florida), the sixth largest
Coca-Cola bottler and one of the largest Black-owned businesses in
the U.S., partnered with CONA Services LLC on a Blue Yonder
implementation. CONA Services (Coke One North America) is a
Coca-Cola System IT company providing enterprise solutions for the
11 largest bottlers in North America. By leveraging Blue Yonder
Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Transportation Management and
other solutions, Coke Florida and CONA have created an
interoperable platform that drives significant cost, service and
efficiency improvements. As just one example, load automation has
increased from zero to over 70%, optimizing resources and reducing
the number of shipments.
- Ingredion: Ingredion is a leading global ingredients
solutions company. In supplying products to customers in food and
beverage, paper and pharmaceuticals manufacturing, Ingredion faced
tremendous demand fluctuations. The company’s goal was to align
shifting demand with inventory on an agile basis, replanning and
re-allocating as needed. Several Blue Yonder solutions, including
Demand Planning and Supply Planning, helped Ingredion increase
forecast accuracy by 2% and reduce inventory by over 100,000 tons.
On-time, in-full deliveries increased by 15%, significantly
improving customer satisfaction.
- Medtronic: Medtronic serves over 74 million patients in
150 countries annually. The company leverages the Blue Yonder
Demand Planning solution to drive a standardized, automated
forecasting process across its worldwide business, resulting in
increased planning accuracy and efficiency. In under a year,
statistical forecast accuracy increased by 13 points — improving
customer service and inventory positions. Medtronic also optimized
planner workload thanks to process standardization and
automation.
- Meijer: Across more than 500 physical locations and its
digital shopping channels, Meijer leveraged the latest technology
to drive growth via merchandising modernization. Blue Yonder Demand
Planning has enabled Meijer to capitalize on AI, ML and advanced
algorithms to improve on-shelf availability, optimize inventory
levels across the supply chain, increase shopper satisfaction and
minimize waste. A rollout of the Blue Yonder Fresh Markdown
Optimization solution is also improving real-time price generation
via advanced machine learning techniques.
- Micron Technology: Micron is integrating Blue Yonder
Supply Planning solution with the Blue Yonder Order Promising
engine for amplified results. Using proprietary algorithms, Order
Promising takes inputs from Supply Planning, considers customer
allocation priorities, and generates commitments in near real time.
Micron has improved its customer conformance metrics like: Sales
Order Time to Commit, Original Promise Date performance, Customer
Requested Date performance, etc., surpassing best-in-class industry
benchmarks and underscoring its commitment to customer
service.
- Postobón: Postobón is the largest nonalcoholic beverage
company in Colombia. In serving millions of consumers mainly in
Colombia, Postobón faces extreme demand volatility. Forecast
inaccuracies were driving up the company’s freight costs and excess
inventories. Postobón leveraged the Blue Yonder Demand Planning
solution to create more accurate forecasts that consider
influencing factors like weather. Advanced statistical forecasting
has helped increase service levels to 95%, eliminate $2 million in
working capital and capture $4.5 million in lost sales. For some
categories, forecast accuracy increased by over 15%.
- Woolworths: Unlike most grocery retailers who rely on
long-life sales, Woolworths derives over 60% of its revenues from
fresh foods. This creates a unique forecasting challenge:
maximizing the availability of perishable products, while
minimizing waste. Blue Yonder Demand Planning has transformed the
retailer’s forecasting process from a resource-intensive and manual
effort to a more automated process that’s driven by data and fueled
by machine learning. Just six months after the software launch,
Woolworths has improved its forecast accuracy and is on track to
meet its aggressive waste-reduction targets. The company’s vision
is to be one of the world’s most responsible retailers, and
reducing waste is a big part of the Woolworths sustainability
journey.
About Blue Yonder
Blue Yonder is the world leader in digital supply chain
transformation. Global retailers, manufacturers and logistics
providers leverage Blue Yonder to optimize their supply chains from
planning through fulfillment, delivery and returns. Blue Yonder’s
AI-embedded, interoperable supply chain solutions are connected
end-to-end via a unified platform and data cloud, enabling business
to collaborate in real time across functions, which supports more
agile decision-making, improved customer satisfaction, profitable
growth, and more resilient, sustainable supply chains. Blue Yonder
- Fulfill your PotentialTM www.blueyonder.com
“Blue Yonder” is a trademark or registered trademark of Blue
Yonder Group, Inc. Any trade, product or service name referenced in
this document using the name “Blue Yonder” is a trademark and/or
property of Blue Yonder Group, Inc. All other company and product
names may be trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of
the companies with which they are associated.
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Blue Yonder Public Relations Contacts: Marina Renneke,
APR, Global Corporate Communications Sr. Director Tel: +1
480-308-3037, marina.renneke@blueyonder.com
Rossella Benti, EMEA Corporate Communications Director Tel: +39
335 7849149, rossella.benti@blueyonder.com