City Plumbing (UK) Optimizes Its Demand and Fulfillment Planning Flows with Blue Yonder

City Plumbing has a diverse customer base and offers more than 20,000 unique products that are sold through its network of branches. As demand has increased, City Plumbing planned to improve upon existing planning processes and legacy systems to forecast and fulfill its wideranging customer needs.

“To keep up with volatile demand, we’ve had to transform our planning processes. Blue Yonder solutions provide a much more granular, more real-time look at future demand, as well as enabling us to pivot with agility as conditions change during the fulfillment phase.” – Supply Chain Management Information Systems Analyst, City Plumbing

City Plumbing leverages demand and fulfillment planning solutions from Blue Yonder, delivered via Microsoft Azure, to maximize its visibility and responsiveness to changing conditions across its diverse customer segments. These solutions are maximizing planning speed, accuracy and efficiency at City Plumbing, positioning the company to profitably meet its ambitious availability and customer service targets.

“Our customers have very individual, bespoke needs. At the same time, we want to have high availability when a customer is looking for a specific product. That combination of demand specificity and high availability creates a challenge. Our Blue Yonder solutions have significantly reduced our reliance on manual processes. We can automate many tasks and manage by exception. That frees our planners’ time for more strategic, higher-value work. They can focus on improved forecast accuracy and conduct root-cause analysis when exceptions occur — instead of spending our time placing and fulfilling orders. Now the system automatically handles that.” - Supply Chain Management Information Systems Analyst, City Plumbing (UK)

“When we decided to move to a cloud delivery model, considerations needed to be made for a disaster recovery plan, in case the system went down. When the transition happened, the functionality was all the same. It was a beautiful thing to witness. It was one of the smoothest changes of a system that I’ve ever been party to.” - Supply Chain Management Information Systems Analyst, City Plumbing (UK)

• City Plumbing utilitizes Blue Yonder’s demand planning solution to manage changing customer needs. The company can more accurately anticipate demand and improve availability across thousands of products.
  
  
• Blue Yonder’s fulfillment capabilities support City Plumbing with agility and responsiveness as it meets shifting market needs. By automating many processes, City Plumbing is increasing its accuracy and efficiency, freeing its planners up for more strategic work.
  
  
• Blue Yonder’s cloud model, hosted on Microsoft Azure, allows City Plumbing to scale on demand, deliver faster and reduce costs. The cloud delivery model positions City Plumbing to integrate, orchestrate and execute in real time to maximize responsiveness.

“We have an extremely collaborative relationship with Blue Yonder. They understand our business and its challenges, and they know how to use the software to address those challenges. They’re always looking for areas of opportunity where we can automate or streamline our work. One of the key reasons that our cloud launch went so smoothly is that Blue Yonder was constantly in contact with us. They work hard to support our success.” – Supply Chain Management Information Systems Analyst, City Plumbing (UK)