Leading food wholesaler METRO operates a complex supply chain with products sold at physical stores and directly delivered to hotels, restaurants, grocers, and other food-service businesses.
These small- to mid-sized customers depend on timely, in-full deliveries from METRO and high levels of in-store product availability to meet their customers’ needs. This pressures METRO to achieve “just right” inventory levels while supporting fast stock turnovers and avoiding excess inventory investments. Accurate planning is also critical to fully utilize METRO’s trucks, labor, and physical space investments.
METRO rolled out Blue Yonder demand planning and fulfillment planning software across 16 countries to increase its supply chain planning accuracy. This was a significant upgrade from the company’s existing manual processes and legacy software solutions.
“Our intelligent Blue Yonder solutions have been a core enabler of planning optimization at METRO,” says Alexander Stepannikov, Supply Chain Planning & Ordering Domain Owner at METRO Digital. “By relying on advanced digital solutions to ingest data, perform rigorous analysis, and create accurate plans, we can meet our defined customer service targets while respecting stock and capacity planning constraints.” Stepannikov credits the Blue Yonder Services team with architecting the solution footprint and providing hands-on implementation support.
As the Blue Yonder solutions have been implemented across multiple countries and channels, METRO sees that related countries demonstrate, on average, a 1% higher availability with better stock performance right from the moment of implementation. This improvement further evolves along with the planning maturity development in the countries.
The availability of goods is one of the key strategic goals of METRO's core strategy. METRO has the ambition to reach 98% of product availability by 2030. In line with this goal, in the financial year October 2023 - September 2024, METRO’s cumulative availability has grown from 96% to 97%. Today, Blue Yonder planning software manages more than €15bn sales volume. The global blueprint implementation will be rolled out in five more countries.
