Seamless shopping experience, AI growth, need for automation, importance of stores and frontline workers, and stabilizing logistics among top trends Blue Yonder is monitoring heading into Q1 2022

Blue Yonder Holding, Inc. (Blue Yonder), a leading digital supply chain and omni-channel commerce fulfillment provider, released its Q4 2022 Company Highlights and perspective on the commerce and logistics trends that matter most heading into Q1 2023.

Quarterly Company Highlights

In Q4 2022, Blue Yonder showed significant progress in several areas of its business, including:

• Added 29 new customer logos in Q4 2022, for a total of 162 net new customers in 2022. Some of the customers who selected or extended their footprint with Blue Yonder during the quarter include:
  • Americas: Boeing, G500 Network, Pitney Bowes
  • APAC/EMEA: Bleckmann, Dalmia Bharat Group, France Boissons, Imperial Brands, Jerónimo Martins Poland, John Lewis & Partners, Kingston Technology Company, Inc., Néstle, PT Map Aktif Adiperkasa Tbk (MAPA), Spencer’s Retail Limited, Suomen Osuuskauppojen Keskuskunta (SOK), Universal Robina Corporation (URC)
• In the second half of 2022, Blue Yonder initiated a dedicated program focused on enhancing the SaaS customer experience through accelerated investment in people, processes, and tools to provide better support, services and experiences. The program allows Blue Yonder to double down on services and support to help customers maximize the value proposition of their deployments. Enhancements as a result of the program are giving our customers the reliability, responsiveness, productivity, and performance they need, better preparing them for changing market conditions and disruptions. Efforts will continue as part of the company’s emphasis to drive increased customer-centric focus in 2023.
• Showcased in 12 key technology industry analyst reports from Gartner, Forrester, ABI, and Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, as well as two Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer recognitions (see full list below).
• On the ESG front, Blue Yonder supported The Canopy Project by planting 36,000 trees in 2022 to offset the company’s travel carbon footprint. This is the seventh year of Blue Yonder’s donation and represents a total of close to 210,000 trees planted.

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Retail Trends in 2023

On the heels of the National Retail Federation’s Retail’s Big Show, Blue Yonder gleaned the following insights from meeting with retailers and partners at the show:

• The Shopping Experience Must Be Seamless: “Omni-channel” and “order management” have given way to “commerce”: the complete shopping experience. Availability and visibility, and how that insight can drive workflow orchestration, remain important for retailers as customers continue to shop in fluid ways, while intelligent fulfillment is critical in a supply-constrained market with rapidly changing demand.
• AI-Powered Supply Chains Gain Momentum. Artificial intelligence is critical in planning and optimization solutions, and can help retailers improve business efficiencies across the entire supply chain with automated business processes spanning demand forecasting, to warehouse robotics.
• Automation and Optimization Are Driving Operations: The retail industry is moving toward higher levels of automation through tasking, labor management, and micro-fulfillment.

Other trends we predict we will see in 2023 include:

• Stores and Frontline Workers Will Continue To Be Key to Success. As shoppers return to stores, in-store merchandising and product availability are equally as important as how best to service buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) and store fulfillment. These demands have made the frontline worker even more important to retailers, so companies need to look at: automation to pick up the mundane tasks, which allows employees to focus on the customer; making the workplace digital for the next-gen worker; and refreshing infrastructure to support the stores and the customer experience. Read more in our “2023: Year of the Employee?” blog post.
• Logistics Will Be Focused on Stabilizing the Supply Chain. Distribution centers, warehouses and, in some cases, transportation will be over capacity in many areas at the start of 2023. Companies who invested in adding capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic will be glad they did to help support long-term plans while others may find it hard to survive the drop in demand and sales, which will make it difficult to pay for the capacity they built. While transportation capacity can be flexed to a certain extent, it is harder to do so with warehouses since real estate is fixed and typically has five- to 10-year leases. Transportation capacity may also be put the test as more retailers stop chartering entire ships and instead use common cargo vessels.
• Retailers Will Lean on Technology To Boost Brand Loyalty. Shopper expectations are at an all-time high, and customers will sacrifice brand loyalty for an optimal shopping experience. In December, Blue Yonder, in collaboration with Incisiv and Microsoft, released the 2023 Omnichannel Experience Index which found that 45% of online shoppers defect for better deals, and 56% of shoppers will abandon their carts due to concerns about delivery time. To keep shoppers returning to their storefronts and websites and to exceed customer expectations, retailers will lean on commerce technologies to provide transparency into real-time inventory status and delivery timelines. Read more in the report.

“Supply chains are at the intersection of new secular trends that are increasing uncertainty and a set of new revolutionary technologies. As a result, we have seen investing in supply chain projects come to the top of the priority list. Customers are leveraging our AI-powered solutions to reduce costs, manage labor shortages, and rewire global manufacturing and trading routes,” said Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder.

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