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 Potential^TM www.blueyonder.com

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