Blue Yonder Archives

US Trade Tariffs Set to Wreak Havoc on Global Supply Chains

Posted on 11 February, 202531 July, 2025 by David Priestman

The global trade landscape is bracing for further turbulence as US President Donald Trump signals that the European Union (EU) could be the next target for tariffs. Following the imposition of 25% levies on goods from Mexico and Canada, along with an additional 10% tax on imports from China, European businesses now face the possibility of similar trade barriers.

Last night (10th February 2025), President Trump confirmed higher tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports – a measure that UK producers say will prove a “devastating blow”.

Rob Shaw, GM EMEA at Fluent Commerce, warns that the market is already in an unstable, ever-changing state, and escalating tariffs could send supply chains into further disarray.

“If the US does proceed with imposing tariffs, other countries will retaliate, as we’ve already seen with China. In this scenario, tariffs may be imposed in the opposite direction, raising costs within the supply chain,” Shaw explains.

“Ultimately, it’s consumers who will bear the brunt of these changes. To protect their profit margins, businesses will inevitably pass on higher costs, placing additional financial strain on buyers already struggling with economic pressures. The exception is the luxury goods market, where high-income consumers will be able to absorb the additional costs.”

The uncertainty has placed UK and EU businesses in a state of limbo, with many preparing contingency plans in case tariffs are imposed. Some companies are considering stockpiling goods to cushion supply disruptions, though this comes with logistical and financial risks. Others are looking to invest in real-time visibility tools to better navigate inventory and supply chain fluctuations.

European Industries Facing a Catch-22 Situation

With potential tariffs looming, some of Europe’s key industries could be forced into difficult decisions. Simon Bowes, CVP Manufacturing Industry Strategy EMEA at Blue Yonder, describes the impact as a “catch-22 dilemma” for sectors like pharmaceuticals.

“Either bear the cost of relocation or absorb the tariffs and face increased costs for manufacturers and consumers,” Bowes explains.

For the luxury goods sector, the impact is expected to be less severe due to the high profit margins that can absorb additional costs. However, the European automotive industry faces a far greater threat.

“For European automotive companies, the threat of tariffs is much more significant. The industry is already struggling due to competition from China, the withdrawal of electric vehicle (EV) subsidies in key markets, and the ongoing transition to European sustainability regulation,” says Bowes.

“As the US is a critical market for European car makers, tariff threats are sending the industry to boiling point—and if placed on internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), it would put a tin lid on everything that’s going bad for the industry.”

With demand for European vehicles in the US already under pressure, tariffs could significantly reduce sales volumes and accelerate production shifts to alternative markets.

Can AI and Tech Help Businesses Navigate the Crisis?

As trade tensions rise, businesses are increasingly turning to technology-driven solutions to navigate the uncertainty. Advanced supply chain management tools and AI-driven scenario modeling are emerging as critical assets for companies trying to mitigate risks.

“As tariff threats loom, businesses critically require flexible tech-led capabilities to execute strategies quickly,” says Bowes.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) can evaluate vast amounts of real-time data. Working like a GPS system, it simulates ‘what if’ scenarios tailored to different variables, meaning businesses can strategically decide the best course of action, whether that is using new suppliers, using a co-manufacturer, or absorbing tariff costs.”

Will Other Countries Retaliate?

One of the most pressing concerns is whether the US tariff strategy will provoke widespread retaliation, leading to a global trade war. If that happens, the ability of businesses to leverage international specialization—such as Taiwan’s semiconductor industry or Germany’s automotive expertise—could be significantly disrupted.

“If US tariffs are imposed, it could set off a chain reaction across the globe,” Bowes warns.

“The rise of tariffs would likely stifle competition and innovation, and while some industries could benefit from protectionism, others would undoubtedly face higher costs and reduced market access.”

The Road Ahead: A Waiting Game for Global Markets

With no immediate resolution in sight, businesses across the UK, EU, and beyond remain in a tense waiting game. If President Trump follows through with EU tariffs, companies will need to adapt quickly—whether through price adjustments, supply chain restructuring, or technological investment.

As global trade remains volatile and unpredictable, one thing is clear: the decisions made in Washington will send ripples through supply chains worldwide.

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US Trade Tariffs’ Supply Chain Disaster

Cloudy Supply Chain Data

Posted on 28 May, 202429 July, 2025 by David Priestman

There were many Davids at the Manifest convention. Logistics Business’ David met with 3 namesakes, including Blue Yonder’s Senior Director for Global Retail Industry Strategy.

Blue Yonder is a major global player in supply chain operating systems, offering specific products for WMS, TMS, Warehouse Execution, Order Management (boosted by the acquisition of Yantriks), Demand Planning, Inventory Optimisation and more. With a turnover of $1.28bn, 6000 employees and 167 new customers last year, representing 17% growth, it is a Microsoft Azure cloud computing partner and a division of Panasonic. The company has released a digital cognitive platform, ‘Luminate’, a generative AI capability, ‘Orchestrator’, and a new data cloud service with its partner Snowflake.

Dave Hamilton, pictured, has 30 years’ experience as a specialist in retail logistics in the USA, much of it at Best Buy. I asked him about the recent acquisition of Doddle, a company we spotlighted in our February issue (p6-7). “We’re excited to have them in the group. They’re strong in solving the returns issue and growing in North America now.”

“Snowflake will change how organisations connect their supply chain network,” Hamilton explains. “Currently there is the challenge of middleware (software that lies between an operating system and the applications running on it), but Snowflake eliminates that as it’s permissive, for example if using ERP software. Data is gold. The ability to share it via the cloud, end-to-end, is great.”

Inter-operable Solutions

I asked Hamilton about the interaction of Blue Yonder software applications with IT hardware used in warehousing and distribution. “Best-in-class is what we want,” he replies, “but we don’t have to provide every hardware product.” Customer use cases span applications in planning, DCs, commerce and transport management, in the third party logistics sector, retail or any manufacturing industry.

Of course, you cannot discuss all these areas without mentioning AI. “In problem-solving, generative AI enables the customer to go further,” Hamilton states. This can result in reducing costs or increasing inventory. “Orchestrator (which runs on its Luminate platform) is agile and co-ordinates decision-making.” It factors in all relevant data and context within the supply chain application to optimize and augment user prompts.

“Blue Yonder Orchestrator helps companies bring value to their data, which is where many companies struggle,” said Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder. “It allows business users to quickly access recommendations, predictive insights, and intelligent decisions to ensure they generate the best outcomes to impact their supply chain positively. In today’s supply chain environment, in which many professionals are nearing retirement age and it’s challenging to retain that institutional knowledge, companies can use Orchestrator as a trusty supply chain assistant that can augment intuition – using the value of the data – to make better and faster decisions.”

Supply Chain Transformation

In the transport management environment FedEx is a major customer. “Our carbon footprint isn’t big, we just sell software, but we can help customers reduce theirs and aid the EV transition,” adds Hamilton. These days WMS is normally co-ordinated with TMS. It should be quick to install. WES looks at tasks and resources in order to plan human and robotic labour. Blue Yonder partner with materials handling equipment suppliers like GreyOrange but remain brand agnostic.

British retail customers include ASDA, M&S, and Sainsbury’s – for whom it has provided inventory planning and other solutions as part of a multi-year supply chain transformation. “We tend to work with tier 1 retailers, plus up-and-coming ones and the sector is as much as 60% of our revenue,” Hamilton reveals, “but we’re putting a lot of attention into 3PLs/LSPs and looking to grow there.”
Innovation leads to an improved customer experience. “We’re a true partner to customers,” he adds. “I’ve sat in their shoes so I can really talk to them. That gives us credibility, but ultimately the product needs to work. Seeing the progress is key. Our teams help provide the value analysis. We should take ours cues from customers and keep our promises in terms of developing products and being future-ready.”

Asda accelerates multi-channel offering with Blue Yonder

Interoperable Solutions for Supply Chain Resilience

Posted on 12 January, 202429 July, 2025 by Keith McKinley

Blue Yonder, a leading supply chain solutions provider, today announced the release of its largest product update in the history of the company, launching the first set of interoperable solutions across the entire supply chain – from planning to warehouse, transportation, and commerce – delivered on the company’s Luminate® Cognitive Platform. Leaning into interoperability allows Blue Yonder to provide its customers with increased productivity, reduced waste, and more resilient supply chains.

“Today’s supply chains are operated by a fragmented ecosystem of legacy solutions, with many being stitched together over time with custom configurations and code,” said Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder. “While many supply chain solution providers claim to offer end-to-end capabilities, it is typically confined to planning or execution spaces where they’ve integrated their own product suites. Blue Yonder is changing that. With this release, we are redefining end-to-end supply chains, and establishing a new category of solutions with interoperable capabilities aligned with our vision to create the supply chain operating system for the world.”

End-to-End Interoperability

As manufacturers, logistics companies, suppliers, and retailers look to build greater resilience and mitigate market volatility in their supply chain, they are often hampered by: siloed business processes and communications breakdowns, lack of visibility, disconnected solutions, and burdensome workflows across planning, transportation, warehouse, e-commerce, and last mile fulfillment. This can lead to inventory waste, high costs, loss of sales, slow responsiveness, lack of resilience and more.

Solving these supply chain challenges requires companies to coordinate and streamline planning and execution management across the end-to-end ecosystem. This includes:
● Orchestrating sourcing, production, logistics and network strategies in a single operating system to shorten lead times, improve service levels, optimise operational efficiencies, maximise demand, and reduce cost.
● Aligning predicted customer demand, network capacity, warehouse capacity, labour capacity, and transportation scheduling prior to sourcing or allocating goods for seamless inventory flow and reduced overhead.
● Building logistics loads that factor in real-time, on-shelf inventory to balance customer demand and waste, generating maximum revenue and margin.

Blue Yonder’s interoperable solutions answer these challenges by:
● Connecting processes, systems, and data seamlessly across Blue Yonder’s Supply Chain Planning and Execution solutions, providing a smarter, more scalable, real-time digital twin to streamline and accelerate enterprise-wide decision-making.
● Offering the end-to-end visibility needed to understand how decisions or actions impact adjacent teams so businesses can work synchronously toward a unified goal.
● Deeply embedding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within the systems to drive decisioning, recommendations, and actions to support a future of autonomous supply chains.
● Ensuring all solutions connect through a single source of data, allowing true real-time collaboration across functions.

The result is more agile, coordinated decision-making that reduces costs, increases revenue, and improves customer loyalty.

Interoperability Enabled by Cutting-Edge Technology Innovations

Blue Yonder’s interoperable solutions are made possible as a result of three key strategic investments by the company:
1) Cloud Native Architecture on a Cognitive Platform: Blue Yonder’s Luminate ® Cognitive Platform is the industry’s premiere cloud-native supply chain platform, delivering enterprise-level speed, scale and security with upgrade-safe extensibility across workflows, data models, and functions. The platform offers infinite intelligence with unconstrained computing power, a single source of truth, and a reimagined user experience. Because Blue Yonder’s cloud-native applications all run on this centralised platform, this then allows companies to make faster, higher-quality decisions; eliminate data siloes; uplevel team performance by increasing productivity and accelerated adoption; and unlock capacity by leveraging the power of embedded AI.

2) Composable Microservices: A composable approach enables companies to augment and enhance existing technologies with Blue Yonder’s industry-leading IP and patented solutions — transforming business functions at the speed and scale that’s right for each company’s business. Blue Yonder’s composable microservices are small, deployable components that each offer a discrete set of capabilities, seamlessly integrated on connected workflows to solve specific functional needs, and interoperable with existing Blue Yonder solutions so businesses can innovate without the need to rip and replace existing investments. With Blue Yonder, businesses can start with the application stack they need today knowing they can easily add capabilities they want, when they’re ready. And instead of lengthy monolithic projects, Blue Yonder offers Composable Journeys, which are implementation paths tailored to the specific vision and budget of each customer and rolled out in phases that can provide expedited time to value.

3) Platform Data Cloud, Powered by Snowflake: Blue Yonder is among the first enterprise supply chain solutions companies building applications to natively run on the Snowflake Data Cloud. Blue Yonder’s Platform Data Cloud, Powered by Snowflake, makes it easy to deliver the right data, at the right location, at the right time by bringing together all the required data to run your supply chain in a centralised location. By combining Blue Yonder’s market-leading supply chain technology and IP with the Snowflake Data Cloud’s powerful capabilities, Blue Yonder is changing the game for its customers by reducing the cost, complexity and time required to transform data while enabling interoperability between applications and collaboration across clouds. Learn more here.

“For years, the supply chain industry has had a data problem – there’s too much of it, it’s scattered across disparate solutions, and sharing has become so risky that some organisations have simply come to avoid it. By partnering with Blue Yonder, Snowflake is helping joint customers address these challenges by centralising data into a single source of truth, reducing the latency in decision-making, and making sharing secure, fast and easy,” said Tim Long, Global Head of Manufacturing, Snowflake. “Together, we’re enabling data, system and business process interoperability by connecting Blue Yonder’s entire end-to-end supply chain portfolio to a Blue Yonder’s Platform Data Cloud, Powered by Snowflake. Now, Blue Yonder’s solutions can deliver scale and performance that allow customers to significantly accelerate time to value, unlock team productivity, and drive greater resilience.”

Next Generation Planning

The first set of microservice-based solutions that bring together all of these interoperable features is Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning solutions. This holistic offering natively runs on the Luminate Cognitive Platform to deliver all the cognitive capabilities needed to support supply chain leaders in achieving higher forecast accuracy, accelerating decision making, and building a more resilient supply chain with fewer resources. Cognitive planning solutions are cloud-native and combine the latest data management technology with Blue Yonder’s proven supply chain planning IP.

Blue Yonder’s cognitive planning solutions also leverage the power of Blue Yonder Orchestrator, the company’s generative AI capability that allows businesses to fuel more intelligent decision-making and faster supply chain orchestration. Learn more about this capability here.

“Cognitive planning takes business planning accuracy and speed to the next level by empowering companies to realise their performance objectives. It does this by allowing them to be aware of critical events and prescribing solutions to manage risks and opportunities in both demand and supply, improving planner productivity and supply chain resilience,” said Angove.

Notably, these advanced solutions empower users to apply hundreds of demand-driving variables and patented ML models to provide unique demand projections, while factoring in business impact and risk. This allows planners to map out various scenarios, set boundaries and objectives, then fire-and-forget. The advanced algorithms autonomously reduce the problem scope to a logical set of scenarios that are realistic and most applicable. Embedded predictive AI evaluates this feasible set of scenarios and recommends the top scenarios that optimise pre-set objectives. This AI/ML-powered scenario planning reduces the average time taken from hours or even days down to minutes and allows planners to focus on more strategic decision-making and actions rather than just collating data.

Synchronised Execution

Blue Yonder is revolutionising supply chain execution by enabling seamless, autonomous collaboration across the execution network to drive unprecedented efficiency, resiliency, agility, and better customer experiences. Synchronised Execution strengthens supply chain resiliency with end-to-end execution interoperability and helps businesses manage disruptions in an optimal and automated fashion by synchronising the data and business process workflows across the order, warehouse, transportation, and resource domains. Customers will achieve operational resiliency through real-time situational awareness, real-time decision making, and the ability to predict and prevent disruptions. As an example, business process interoperability allows a business to seamlessly reallocate orders in the case of an inbound supply shortage, or create iterative optimisation loads to handle warehouse disruptions, or determine the optimal way to fulfill an order, even if it is sourced from multiple nodes.

“Retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers will achieve superior performance with intelligent insight and informed decisions to ensure they are ahead of every disruption with complete visibility at every point of execution. With advanced customer insights about buying behaviour and preferences, businesses can make informed decisions about inventory allocation, optimised fulfillment, transportation planning and warehouse operations,” shared Angove.

Solutions launched in this space include:
● Analyst Workbench delivers a new, user-friendly experience to explore data, visualise metrics and generate insights. These new, innovative capabilities deliver end-to-end visibility across the network and the ability to mix, match, and analyse data from any digital touch point driving more informed decisions and actions.
● Unified Commerce Simulator empowers businesses to create, analyse, and refine fulfillment sourcing strategies driving more predictable fulfillment results with less risk to the business. This digital twin environment means businesses can manipulate optimisation levers for various scenarios and run simulations against production data to enable comparisons between actual output versus output using the changed levers.