Optimized Order Promising for Leading Food Distributor

INDUSTRY

Consumer Products

SOLUTION

Connected Planning & Fulfillment

OFFERING

Demand/Supply Matching, Hierarchical Optimization Implementation

TECHNOLOGY

Blue Yonder Enterprise Supply Planning (ESP)

THE IMPERATIVE FOR CHANGE

Navigating network complexity and manual effort for higher service levels & inventory turns

As one of North America’s largest distributor of fresh and frozen foods, the company buys full truckloads from manufacturers for long-tail products, consolidates inventory, and redistributes multi-temperature LTL orders to distributors.

Doing this efficiently means redistributing centrally-stored inventory across a complex hub-and-spoke network to move products nearer to customers. Short lead times, a complex set of fulfillment options, and basic demand-supply matching automation led to significant amounts of manual work and an inefficient use of inventory.

Recognizing that legacy order management systems fell short, the organization sought a better way to decide which orders to fill, delay or cancel without compromising customer trust or financial performance.

But competing objectives collided. High-margin products and accounts needed first-in-line service. Use of alternative sourcing was considered but didn't lead to efficient cross-site transportation. And customer perceptions of fairness weighed heavily. Traditional OMS rules-based prioritization simply couldn’t keep up. A smarter, more adaptive model — one grounded in supply chain science — was required.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE SOLUTION

Smarter math, better moves

Traditional order management was too blunt of an instrument to evaluate all the potential sourcing trade-offs and the competing priorities of margin, service levels and fairness.

The breakthrough came from shifting away from heuristics toward optimization — replacing an order-by-order planning process with an approach that would optimally evaluate all potential sourcing options and optimize the matching of demand and supply.

Beyond OMS: Elevating from "sorting" to optimizing

The organization initially assumed an Order Management System upgrade would resolve its fulfillment challenges. However, the complexity in the client’s network lent itself to a different approach.

Recognizing the need to optimally match demand and supply following a tiered set of business priorities, we introduced a more strategic path—leveraging Blue Yonder’s Enterprise Supply Planning (ESP) and it’s Linear Programming (LP) optimization engine purpose-built for multi-variable prioritization.

A strategic design for a complex equation

Our team led a comprehensive discovery process to model prioritization needs across several core dimensions, including service commitments, profit contribution, lead time constraints, customer classification and product perishability.

This assessment enabled us to construct a tailored optimization model that would dynamically score and sequence order fulfillment across the entire network.

Proactive planning replaces firefighting

Prior to this new solution, the company’s planners would manually review a plan generated by a legacy system and fix as much as possible before sending the orders to the warehouses to ship.

The implementation of Blue Yonder ESP allowed them to move from reactive decision-making to proactive scenario planning. Our model embedded business logic directly into the LP solver—eliminating manual overrides, ensuring transparency and driving trust in the system. Manual overrides plummeted as a result.

Configurable by design, scalable by default

The model wasn’t a one-off. We built in controls to recalibrate prioritization weights by product category, season, or account strategy — empowering planners to fine-tune optimization logic without rebuilding from scratch.

This moved the focus to the business rules and system inputs versus spending time fixing the plan outputs every day. The solution solves five times a day to address incoming orders and identify constraints, with a final solve ready to drop to the warehouse with little intervention.

Proof that smarter math drives smarter business

Rather than simply improving order fill rates, the solution delivered holistic value: Better inventory utilization, faster decision cycles, reduced spoilage ad a measurable uptick in customer satisfaction — all grounded in an intelligent, defensible fulfillment strategy.

BUSINESS IMPACT

The proof is in the pudding (and the pallets)

This innovative application of Blue Yonder's Enterprise Supply Planning showed the incredible power of optimization to plan fulfillment. Optimization is only as good as the business outcomes it delivers.

By embedding prioritization logic directly into the planning engine, the company unlocked new levels of agility, customer trust, and profitability—while eliminating waste and planner frustration along the way.

Optimized Order Promising for a Leading Food Distributor