Blue Yonder’s Technology Delivers Improved Product Availability for Morrisons With Shelf Gaps Down 30%

LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#AI—Blue Yonder, the leading provider of artificial intelligence and
machine learning applications for retail, today announces that it has
partnered with Morrisons to optimize replenishment and automate ordering
of 26,000 ambient and long-life product SKUs in all its 491 stores.

The Morrisons team have worked with Blue Yonder to use its technology to
improve product availability. The ordering system is simpler, easy to
use and is reducing shelf gaps by up to 30%.

The Blue Yonder Replenishment Optimisation technology automatically
analyzes sales data and other data sources from Morrisons and combines
this with external data such as weather forecasts and public holidays.
Through the automated analysis of data, the system can predict the level
of demand down to the individual product and store location. Blue
Yonder’s technology then fully automates ordering per store and per
product.

Blue Yonder’s Replenishment Optimization uses cloud technology, making
it capital-light and highly scalable. Using machine learning technology,
the system learns as it goes and can use a vast and complex amount of
data to make highly accurate ordering decisions.

The benefits of the system are multiple: Employees no longer need to
spend time manually ordering goods, which frees up their time for other
tasks, such as attending to customers and; with improved in-store
availability, customer satisfaction improves.

The system was launched in Morrisons during 2016 and now covers all 491
stores, automating over 13 million ordering decisions per day.

In Morrisons’ preliminary results announcement 2016/17, Morrisons’ CEO,
David Potts said: “Our biggest new initiative has been our new
automated ordering system. The system is capital light, utilizing
cloud technology and store-specific historic sales data to forecast
stock requirements. It is reducing costs and stock levels, while also
saving time for colleagues, and providing a better offer for customers.”

Markus Juhr-De Benedetti, Chief Revenue Officer of Blue Yonder said: “We
are delighted to have supported Morrisons in improving their product
availability and therefore better serving their customers. The retail
landscape is changing faster today than ever before – Blue Yonder’s
mission is to provide a competitive advantage to retailers through
Machine Learning. Every day, Blue Yonder delivers 600 million decisions
to its customers that boost revenues, increase margins and enable rapid
responses to changing market dynamics.”

About Blue Yonder

Blue Yonder is the leading provider of artificial intelligence and
machine learning solutions for retail. Every day, we deliver 600 million
decisions to our customers that boost revenues, increase margins and
enable rapid responses to changing market dynamics.

Our demand-based predictive merchandising, automated replenishment
and price optimization solutions are driven by sophisticated machine
learning algorithms, developed by one of the largest teams of PhD-level
data scientists in retail.

Founded in 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany, by former CERN scientist
Professor Michael Feindt, Blue Yonder now operates in both Europe and
the United States. Blue Yonder works with renowned retail brands such as
Morrisons, OTTO, Kaufland and dm.

Blue Yonder has been awarded the Gartner Cool Vendor Award 2015, the
Experton Big Data Leader Award 2016 and the BT Retail Week Technology
Award, among many others.

Blue Yonder. Best Decisions, Delivered Daily.

Contacts

Blue Yonder
Sian Hobday or Claire Williamson
blueyonder@brightbee.co.uk
+44
(0)20 8819 3170