Arizona software company Blue Yonder has extended its relationship with UK retailer Asda to cover last-kilometre delivery and fulfilment.

Asda consists of supercentres, superstores and smaller supermarkets. The retailer also runs petrol filling stations and clothing and home merchandise outlets. The company employs more than 140,000 people serving more than 16 million customers who shop in its 640 stores and online weekly.

It has selected Blue Yonder’s order management system to accelerate its omnichannel transformation. This follows last year it picking Blue Yonder to transform digitally its end-to-end supply chain and retail operations.

The retailer will use Blue Yonder’s LuminateCommerce software to modernise its order management capabilities. Asda will also partner with Bringg, a Blue Yonder technology alliance partner, to make each element of the supply chain seamless, connected and orchestrated.

With this, Asda should be able to process orders faster to improve the customer experience, provide customers with real-time inventory visibility from the beginning of the shopping experience as well as pre-sourcing fulfilment options, connect with the entire supply chain considering the capacity to fulfil demand across any channel at any time, and provide dynamic slotting options to the end customer for both home deliveries and pickup in store.

Blue Yonder’s flexible OMS microservices, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, should help Asda optimise the entire click-to-deliver journey, starting with an engaging customer experience through efficient order fulfilment.

“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, chief information officer at Asda. “We have been extremely impressed by Blue Yonder’s OMS microservices, which we will deploy across our grocery, clothing and general merchandise segments.”

With Bringg, Asda will be able to optimise its last-kilometre operations to deliver on-time to meet customer expectations. The combination will support Asda’s home delivery service, click-and-collect proposition, as well as new channels such as express commerce platforms.

“The challenges and complexities of faster, more convenient and on-demand order orchestration, delivery and fulfilment are grand,” said Nikolai Avrutov, vice president at 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.”

Gael Ramaen, vice president at Blue Yonder, added: “Asda is leading a game-changing retail transformation focused on customer centricity, from first to last mile. We are very excited to extend our relationship with Asda into an area where we are connecting ecommerce 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 modernise its business and invest in customer proposition.”

Founded in the 1960s in Yorkshire, Asda is the UK’s third largest supermarket and was acquired by the Issa Brothers and TDR Capital in 2021.