Asda Teams With Blue Yonder and Bringg

Having teamed with Blue Yonder in 2021 to digitally transform its end-to-end supply chain and retail operations, major U.K. retailer Asda has now selected the company’s Luminate Commerce solutions to modernize its order management capabilities. Asda will also join forces with delivery and fulfillment cloud platform Bringg, a Blue Yonder technology alliance partner, to make each link in the supply chain seamless, connected and orchestrated.

With Blue Yonder’s order management (OMS) microservices, Asda will be able to process orders faster to enhance the customer experience; provide customers with real-time inventory visibility from the beginning of the shopping experience, as well as pre-sourcing fulfillment options; connect with the entire supply chain, with the capacity to fulfill demand across any channel, at any time; and provide dynamic slotting options to the end customer for both home deliveries and in-store pickup.

“Omnichannel is at the heart of our strategy and customer proposition, where we want to provide a great customer experience and a seamless user journey,” said Carl Dawson, CIO of Leeds, Yorkshire-based Asda, which consists of supercenters, superstores and smaller supermarkets, as well as fuel stations and Asda Living stores offering its popular George clothing and home merchandise lines. “We have been extremely impressed by Blue Yonder’s OMS microservices, which we will deploy across our grocery, clothing and general merchandise segments.” 

Blue Yonder’s flexible OMS microservices, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, will help Asda optimize the entire click-to-deliver journey, beginning with an engaging customer experience through efficient order fulfillment. With Bringg, Asda will be able to optimize its last-mile operations to deliver items on time. This combination will support Asda’s home delivery service, click-and-collect operation and new channels such as express commerce platforms.

 “Asda is leading a game-changing retail transformation focused on customer centricity, from first to last mile,” noted Gael Ramaen, VP, commerce at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Blue Yonder. “We are very excited to extend our relationship with Asda into an area where we are connecting e-commerce with a true omnichannel landscape. Our modern OMS microservices are engineered to scale, perform and operate under the highest volumes seen on the market. Our OMS microservices, SaaS-native, API-first components leverage the latest technology and engineering to speed up our clients’ transformations. We believe that this will help Asda to continue to modernize its business and invest in customer proposition.” 

 “The challenges and complexities of faster, more convenient and on-demand order orchestration, delivery and fulfillment are grand,” said Nikolai Avrutov, VP alliances  at Chicago-based Bringg. “In order to achieve game-changing capabilities on these fronts, retailers need their technology vendors to work closely together and to relentlessly raise the bar for its mutual customers through tight collaboration and strategic co-innovation. We are proud to be doing just that with Blue Yonder for Asda.”

Asda, the United Kingdom’s third-largest supermarket, was acquired by the Issa Brothers and TDR Capital Ltd. in 2021 from Walmart. Each week, more than 16 million customers visit Asda’s 640 supercenters, superstores, supermarkets, Asda Living stores and standalone petrol stations, and are served by more than 140,000 associates.

Meanwhile at Walmart, each week, approximately 230 million customers and members visit its more than 10,500 stores and numerous e-commerce websites under 46 banners in 24 countries. The company employs approximately 2.3 million associates worldwide. Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart U.S. is No. 1 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2022 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.