IBM Sterling vs Blue Yonder

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Our analysts compared IBM Sterling vs Blue Yonder based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Supply Chain Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

IBM Sterling Software Tool

Product Basics

IBM Sterling is an open, integrated platform that leverages advanced technologies like AI and blockchain to connect with the supplier ecosystem. It provides real-time insights, end-to-end visibility and recommended measures to transform interruptions into customer engagement, profit and growth opportunities.

It offers support for supplier, inventory and order management. Users can build smarter business networks using business process improvement, supply chain visibility, supplier collaboration, manufacturing solutions, order fulfillment and retail solutions. It also supports B2B collaboration to fulfill ongoing business demands, minimize complexity and reduce costs.
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Blue Yonder’s supply chain suite focuses on omnichannel commerce fulfillment. It’s suitable for mid-sized to large firms. It enables real-time collaboration as its tools are linked end-to-end in one place.

The Luminate Platform uses cognitive AI and machine learning to catch possible issues and highlight prospects. Users can also set up scenario testing rooms and work together. It recommends actions and provides predictive reports. Its capacity to run scenarios and provide machine-learning-guided actions are standout features. It also supports integration and customization with partners.

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$80 Monthly
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$100,000 Annually
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Assistance

Documentation
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Live Online
Videos
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FAQ
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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Product Insights

  • Evolve Business Processes: Maintain business continuity, reduce operational silos, respond to market disruptions and mitigate risks with intelligent workflows. Improve interactions between people, data and processes through its experts and reduce inventory costs with process improvements. 
  • Improve Visibility: Supply chain stakeholders can access data related to inventory, order processes, delivery and potential disruptions. Improves customer service, assists with regulatory directives and mitigates interruptions affecting supplier inventory levels and product delivery with advanced insights. 
  • Supplier Collaboration: Streamline collaboration to drive efficiencies, increase supplier satisfaction, resolve disruptions for procure-to-pay transactions and order-to-cash with supplier collaboration solutions and global business networks. Quickly respond to supplier issues with embedded AI capabilities like cycle time prediction, anomaly detection and next-best-action recommendations. 
  • Deliver Customer Promises: Track orders from inception to delivery, manage data and processes and gain visibility into all orders throughout channels. Offers various solutions that include order management, order fulfillment, inventory management and digital store operations. 
  • Enhance Manufacturing Management: Innovate supply chain management by transforming outdated processes, uncovering hidden insights and delivering superior customer experience with automation, IoT, AI and blockchain. It helps avoid disruptions, improve visibility, respond quickly and streamline planning and optimization. 
  • Retail Technology Services: Evolve the shopping experience with advanced retail solutions for fulfilling digital demands. Revitalize customer engagement by delivering omnichannel marketing messages and offers tailored to the customer base. Minimize disruptions to the supply chain through various retail technology solutions. 
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  • Merge Planning and Execution: Use Luminate Planning to manage the supply chain. It focuses on clear visualization and priority setting for rising issues. Plus, it employs machine learning to solve them. Users get an all-around view of their carrier and supplier network. It goes beyond typical response planning methods to sense disruptions and adjust plans. It also displays real-time updates on orders, shipments and inventory.
  • Optimize Inventory: Improve stock management and planning with a united view of inventory data. Smart solutions create inventory goals, helping planners resolve out-of-stock cases and late deliveries. Consider metrics like sales history, on-hand inventory and orders for planning. Introduce new products using history and forecast data across categories. This strategy minimizes the chances of surplus or shortage.
  • Handle Assortment: Offer the right products by combining buyer preferences, lifecycle plans, deep analytics and size optimization. Blue Yonder’s Assortment Optimization works with its Space Planning. Turn assortment decisions into store displays to unlock greater sales and higher profits.
  • Improve Supply Networks: Model and optimize the supply chain to handle strategic concerns. Blue Yonder’s network design tool offers end-to-end solutions for growing, curbing disruption or optimizing available resources. It mimics the chain from raw materials to end products. If a particular part of the chain is causing issues or is affected by a recent event, it can focus on that, too.
  • Simplify Warehouse Functions: Use real-time processing to cut warehousing costs. Selection and storage strategies also become efficient. The system simplifies and directs processes by combining labor laws and task management. Its tasking abilities enable clear operations using data-driven insights. This capability results in cost-effective, error-free warehousing.
  • Refine Forecasting: Boost forecasts with smart statistics. Blue Yonder Demand 360 reduces cycle time and database management. This automation leads to higher productivity. It simplifies the forecasting process and encourages better teamwork. This results in less waste, ideal labor use and better sustainability.
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  • Business Network: Offers cloud-based and security-rich connectivity with suppliers, partners and customers. Ensure timely order deliveries with real-time intelligence and recommendations through AI capabilities. Provides multi-party visibility of digital events throughout the supply chain via blockchain, empowering transparency and trust. 
  • Food Trust: Connects participants through an immutable, permissioned and shared record of processing details, food provenance, transaction data and more through its collaborative network. Trace the location and status of food products, including essential details like multi-ingredient and farm-store view. 
  • Visibility Insights: Optimize performance by correlating data from disparate and siloed systems, creating digital playbooks and capturing organizational knowledge. Accelerate time to value, get intelligent insights, manage inventory and mitigate disruptions to meet demand through the inventory control tower. Supply chain intelligence services help boost data integration by developing purpose-built control towers using a control tower solution blueprint. 
  • TradeLens Platform: Gain access to a supply chain and logistics network with over half of the global container shipping volume data coverage through an interconnected supply chain partners system. Every shipment party can access their information and all transactions’ audit trails using its permission matrix. Offers services and apps developed by TradeLens and third parties to accelerate innovation and value creation. 
  • Trust Your Supplier: Identify, onboard and manage qualified suppliers through a blockchain-based solution. It helps expedite supplier onboarding, lower procurement operating costs, reduce compliance risk, speed new supplier assessments, access verified data and streamline insight sharing. 
  • Business Transaction Intelligence: Provides insights into B2B transaction lifecycles. Offers multi-part shared transaction visibility and empowers users with real-time visibility and self-service. Prevents potential risks by giving discrepancy alerts on B2B transaction anomalies. 
  • Transaction Manager: Automates manual B2B transactions and helps save money and time by cutting costs, reducing errors and elevating user satisfaction with customers, non-EDI suppliers and other trading partners. Gain unified visibility throughout supply chain partner transactions and onboard non-technical trading partners. 
  • Document Conversion Services: Converts manual transactions and non-structured documents like email, pdf and fax into EDI or other structured formats. Provides various features, including advanced OCR to read images, customized exception handling, multiple language support and ICR technology to recognize handwriting. 
  • Order Management: Ensures omnichannel order fulfillment by combining inventory and delivery visibility, multichannel order aggregation and service availability in a single platform. It helps customize monitoring and alerts, take immediate actions on capacity, deliver order promises with intelligent fulfillment and use reverse logistics to track inventory. 
  • Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson: Enhance existing order management systems and minimize cost-to-serve with cognitive analytics engine. Retailers can utilize store capacity, balance protecting margins and meet delivery expectations, increasing profits. 
  • Inventory Visibility: Explore product highlights and find use-case specific solutions. Users can personalize dashboards, balance inventory across channels, track inventory velocity, enable drop shipping, leverage autoscaling, get real-time views with the Cassandra database, Akamai gateways and more. 
  • Store Engagement: Gain inventory, customer and order data view through an intuitive user-interface, accessible from mobile devices and sales counters. Provides cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enables flexible fulfillment options, helps standardize processes for task and inventory management and manages returns throughout channels using purpose-built tools. 
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  • Demand Planning: Blue Yonder weighs different factors that drive demand and predicts business impacts and risks. This ability helps enhance inventory, plan productivity and understand buyers' needs. Demand-driving variables provide exact projections that enable informed decisions.
  • Network Design: Synchronize planning and execution plans to improve financial performance and meet high service expectations. A better network boosts sustainability and lowers operating risks and costs.
  • Control Tower: The Luminate Tower helps firms accurately read data from various sources. It uses machine learning to identify and solve supply chain issues. It also boosts teamwork and improves visibility across the whole network.
  • Production Planning: It has a decision support module for production scheduling. Use it to balance demand with proper capacity, material and due-date rules. It blends production control, manufacturing and procurement planning to meet demands at the right costs.
  • Transportation Management: Blue Yonder handles inbound and outbound processes and merges carrier supplier partnership tools. It manages business assets to improve profitability and stay ahead of competitors.
  • Space and Floor Planning: Retailers can assign products correctly, use buyer insights to drive income, calculate KPIs using strong analytics and expand selling space. Associates can contact customers to deliver brand promises with its mobile store execution module.
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Product Ranking

#19

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

#3

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

IBM Sterling
Blue Yonder
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Inventory Management Logistics And Transportation Mobile Capabilites Procurement And Supplier Management Purchase Order Management Supply Chain Analytics Supply Chain Planning Warehouse Labor Management Warehouse Management 100 99 62 81 93 100 98 96 89 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 47 reviews
Great User Sentiment 42 reviews
84%
of users recommend this product

IBM Sterling has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 47 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

83%
of users recommend this product

Blue Yonder has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 42 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

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4.7 (3)
4.1 (38)
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5.0 (1)
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4.6 (5)
4.5 (20)
4.5 (2)
2.5 (2)
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3.8 (17)

Awards

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SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Blue Yonder and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Inventory Management, Logistics and Transportation, Supply Chain Analytics and Supply Chain Planning.

Inventory Management Award
Logistics and Transportation Award
Supply Chain Analytics Award
Supply Chain Planning Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Integration: It supports integration with multiple external systems, as noted by 88% of reviewers who mention integration.
Customization: It offers highly customizable tools and features, as observed by 50% of the users who refer to reports.
Ease of Use: It offers a flexible platform that is easy to use, manage and modify, as noted by all the reviewers specifying ease of use.
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Inventory Optimization: All users appreciated the inventory management module, which reduced stock-outs and prescribed optimal inventory.
Planning and Forecasting: All users agreed that Blue Yonder offers multi-level forecasting and guided supply planning.
Visibility: All users commended the product for its end-to-end visibility.
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Learning Curve: It is complicated to understand and involves a steep learning curve, as stated by 57% of the users who report learning curve.
Interface: Over 50% of reviewers that mentioned the interface stated that the interface is not user-friendly and intuitive.
Resource-Intensive: It consumes a large amount of system resources, as observed by all reviewers referring to system resource utilization.
Implementation: Around 67% of the users who specified implementation report that the deployment and implementation process is cumbersome.
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Implementation: All users reported that implementation time is lengthy and needs constant support.
Customization: 80% of users said the product should offer more customization options.
User Interface: 67% of users struggled to navigate the product’s intuitive interface.
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IBM Sterling is a flexible and easy-to-use supply chain suite that helps its customers build dynamic and smarter business networks. It has a highly customizable platform and supports comprehensive integration capabilities with various external systems. Many reviewers have noted that it does not have an intuitive user interface, and the implementation process can be cumbersome. It involves a steep learning curve, and users find it complicated to understand. It also consumes a large amount of system resources, making it slow sometimes.

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Blue Yonder helps businesses plan their supply chains. It's suitable for medium and large companies. This tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help companies spot problems quickly. It boosts collaboration, offers scenario testing and predicts results.Users like Blue Yonder because it helps manage stock levels and plan for future needs. It also gives a clear view of supplier networks and tracks orders, shipments and inventory in real time.However, some users say that it takes a long time to set up and needs constant support. They also wish it was easier to customize and more user-friendly. Overall, the tool is known for its wide range of features, which help companies manage their supply chains more efficiently.

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