What is Blue Yonder Supply Chain Strategist
Blue Yonder Supply Chain Strategist is a comprehensive network design and scenario planning application that enables organizations to create a "digital twin" of their entire supply chain to model, analyze, and optimize their physical footprint for cost, service, and sustainability.
While many planning tools focus on how much to make or move within the existing network, Supply Chain Strategist focuses on what the network should look like. It answers the foundational questions of the enterprise: "Where should we locate our next distribution center?" "What is the impact of near-shoring production?" "How do we consolidate our network after an acquisition?" It transforms network design from a periodic consulting project into a continuous, internal strategic capability.
Why It Matters: Strategic Agility in a Fluid Market
In the past, supply chain networks were designed once and remained static for years. Today, shifting trade policies, fluctuating fuel costs, and evolving customer service expectations (e.g., next-day delivery) render static networks obsolete quickly.
Blue Yonder Supply Chain Strategist empowers companies to move from reactive adaptation to proactive design. By continuously evaluating the network structure, organizations can identify structural inefficiencies—such as a warehouse that is too small or a transport lane that is too carbon-intensive—and restructure them before they erode margin.
How It Works: The Digital Twin Workbench
The application functions as a strategic sandbox for the supply chain executive.
- Digital Twin Creation: It builds a granular model of the end-to-end chain, ingesting data on suppliers, manufacturing plants, distribution centers, cross-docks, and customer locations, along with their associated costs and capacities.
- Scenario Modeling: Planners can run unlimited "what-if" scenarios. For example, "What if we close the New Jersey DC and open one in Pennsylvania?" or "What if crude oil prices spike by 20%?"
- Multi-Objective Optimization: The tool doesn't just solve for the lowest cost; it optimizes for complex trade-offs, finding the "efficient frontier" between Total Landed Cost, Service Levels, and CO2 Emissions.
Key Benefits
- Reduce Total Logistics Costs: By optimizing facility locations and transport flows, companies typically uncover 10–15% in logistics cost savings.
- Optimize Inventory Placement: It incorporates Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO) logic to determine the optimal inventory strategy for the new network design, routinely yielding 10–30% inventory reductions.
- Sustainability Modeling: It allows organizations to operationalize their ESG goals by quantifying the carbon footprint of different network configurations (e.g., rail vs. truck, local vs. global sourcing).
- Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) Efficiency: Helps validate multi-million dollar infrastructure investments (like building a new factory) with rigorous data modeling before ground is broken.
The Blue Yonder Difference
Blue Yonder differentiates Supply Chain Strategist by its depth and integration. Unlike lightweight visualization tools, it handles the intense mathematical complexity of global supply chains, including tax implications, duty drawbacks, and complex flow constraints. Furthermore, the designs created in Strategist are not just theoretical slides; they can be operationalized by exporting the new network parameters directly into Blue Yonder's operational planning and execution systems.