Every morning, CONA Services monitors its Blue Yonder dashboards, applications, and key performance indicators (KPIs) across its entire operations. If there are any disruptions or deviations from plan, these issues are resolved collaboratively before they have a significant impact on the supply chain performance of the bottlers. This daily tactical planning session complements CONA’s long-range planning efforts, ensuring all bottlers are on track to achieve optimal cost and service outcomes.
As a result, CONA’s planners have benefited from increases in speed and efficiency, while also freeing up time for higher-value work, ultimately delivering better service to their bottling partners. Some key benefits include:
Inventory improvements
CONA bottlers have seen significant improvement in inventory positions, reduced “days of supply,” decreased out-of-stock situations, and a several percentage points increase in demand forecast accuracy.
Increased visibility and greater insights
Blue Yonder provides more visibility to CONA bottlers so they can dig deeper into the data and use its analytics and planning capabilities for better and more reliable demand, supply, transportation, and production plans. It has made them more resilient by putting a cohesive enterprise planning solution together in one place.
Increased automation by 70%
CONA has also gained from automating numerous processes that were previously highly manual. In some cases, it has seen an increase by 70%. This means, CONA and bottler associates enjoy a better user experience and have more flexibility to focus on critical tasks and improve their performance.
Artificial intelligence, Snowflake, and the Blue Yonder platform
CONA is not resting on its laurels. It is already experimenting with artificial intelligence specifically within demand forecasting, gathering data, classifying data, and examining use cases. It has also launched a pilot program with one of its bottlers to explore the potential added benefits of Blue Yonder Cognitive Demand Planning, which is powered by the Blue Yonder platform and includes the latest AI and ML technology.
Looking ahead, CONA is starting to move from a private cloud to the public cloud utilizing Microsoft Azure, while also planning to re-platform the solution onto the Blue Yonder Platform (powered by Snowflake Data Cloud). Together, these changes will improve latency and speed to drive its business to the next level. Blue Yonder is proud to partner with CONA every step of the way.
