Blue Yonder ICON: Taking the 250-Year View on Supply Chains

Blue Yonder ICON: Taking the 250-Year View on Supply Chains
This IDC Perspective details key takeaways from Blue Yonder ICON. This year's Blue Yonder ICON presented a vision of a revolutionized supply chain that combines abundance with sustainability by reimagining the way data is stored, accessed, and used. The reimagined supply chain event emphasized demand from unknown to known, capacity from constrained to unleashed, and pricing from fixed to dynamic. The key investment areas focused on AI-powered, interoperable suite of supply chain execution microservices of fulfillment to distribution, first- to last-mile optimization, and reimagining collaboration and visibility.To achieve this, the company reported that it will invest in the following three areas:Customer experience (CX) and cloudAcceleration of its current road mapsNew innovation, including a new class of cognitive applications"A core takeaway message from the conference was that technology has advanced to the point that the vision those of us watching supply chains have long batted around — of interconnected end-to-end supply chains operating and optimized on real-time data — is achievable and that Blue Yonder is undertaking the steps to enable the transformation," said Jordan K. Speer, research director, Worldwide Retail Product Sourcing, Fulfillment and Sustainability Strategies."IDC believes that Blue Yonder's new direction can be a game changer in the industry," said Ananda Chakravarty, research vice president, Retail Merchandising and Marketing Analytics Strategies. "The integration of AI/ML, new innovations, and data cloud vision and reworking of applications to be cloud native at the point of data storage are forward thinking and will be critical to success for the retail market. However, there are factors that Blue Yonder must overcome to execute this vision and assert leadership in the retail industry."

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