As e-commerce growth is continuing at a rapid pace, companies are having to rapidly change their logistics footprint (both operational and physical) and fulfillment to match rising customer expectations. As we move into a post-COVID-19 environment, logistics executives plan to implement or enhance their technology, including warehouse management systems (WMS), transportation management system (TMS), artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities, and cloud infrastructure, as highlighted by the recent 2021 Blue Yonder Logistics Executive Survey.

Top of mind are logistics systems related to the fulfillment process improvement and the scalability of IT infrastructure, as customer-centricity has become the way to win. Per our understanding, this current landscape is also reflected in the recently released 2021 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) report[1] where per our understanding innovation is continuing to differentiate WMS offerings and technology sophistication is a key criterion.

Blue Yonder WMS

We are excited to highlight that Blue Yonder has been again named in the Critical Capabilities for WMS report and has been scored amongst highest 3 evaluated vendors across Level 3 and Level 4 Warehouse Operations use cases. The Gartner findings and identified trends we believe support our directions and commitment to innovate in order to enable our customers to operationalize and unify digital distribution across warehouse, labor, automation, and transportation.

Blue Yonder’s recognition includes:

• Received second highest rank in Level 3 Warehouse Operation use case
• Received the third highest rank in the Level 4 Warehouse Operation use case
• Scored in highest 4 for Level 5 Warehouse Operation use case

We believe that our recognized strong labor and workforce management, analytics, mobile reporting, exception monitoring, and usability are helping our customers to enhance operational efficiencies and agility. We also believe that our strong implementation and system management tools, adaptability, templatizations (such as graphical workflow visualization tools), and integration utilities (with more than 200 APIs) reflect our ability to enhance our customers’ digital transformation.

Expanding Capabilities to Match Customer Needs Post-Pandemic

Based on our understanding, the Gartner report emphasizes technology trends such as labor management, work planning and optimization, multitenant cloud solutions, and robot integration capabilities, as customers, per our interpretation, are seeking a differentiated set of WMS capabilities to better compete, particularly as the world begins to emerge from the pandemic.

To match the customer trends highlighted in the report, we believe Blue Yonder is:

• Leveraging its AI domain expertise for Warehouse Tasking (see also Warehouse Tasking animation video) to greatly improving delivery performance resource utilization and Robotics Hub (see also Robotics Hub animation video) to accelerate onboarding of multiple robotics vendors
• Enabling an API-centric approach through its Luminate™ Platform to connect its WMS with transportation management, and Luminate Control Tower to enable Unified Logistics.
• Continuing to innovate with the upcoming launch of its Luminate WMS, a SaaS-native solution powered by microservices such as Fulfillment-as-a-Serviceto enable last- and middle-mile fulfillment including micro-fulfillment centers (MFCs) and dark stores.
• Launching its Warehouse Execution System, amulti-tenant, API-led solution to intelligently synchronize, sequence, and assign work to both labor and machine.