What is the Blue Yonder Category Management Suite?

Blue Yonder is a world-leading provider of end-to-end supply chain and retail planning solutions, helping organizations connect data and decisions from logistics and inventory through demand forecasting and execution. The Category Management Suite sits within this broader platform and provides specialized tools for Retailers and Suppliers to collaborate and support the needs of category, space, and assortment planning.

It enables teams to move from isolated spreadsheets, manual processes, and legacy software toward more centralized, repeatable, and scalable processes grounded in shared data.

At a high level, the Blue Yonder Category Management Suite helps teams:

• Optimize customer-centric clusters and store assortments
• Manage and optimize Planograms and Store Space management and optimization so products are placed where demand is highest by connecting both upstream and downstream processes
• Improve accuracy and consistency by tying decisions back to a unified data foundation
• Standardize planning processes across clusters, banners, or store groups
• Reduce manual work through rules-based planning and automation to improve speed to shelf and market fluctuations

These capabilities support better category strategies, planogram validation, and faster execution across the retail lifecycle.

Core applications in the Blue Yonder suite

Space Planning

Space Planning is the most commonly used application in the Blue Yonder suite because it’s focused on the vertical shelf view and is the main way of communicating how strategy meets execution at the shelf. 

This helps teams to optimize product placement, adjacency, and shelf layouts within a category – and is also the main source of information for things like Days of Supply (DOS), Capacity, and other metrics that drive the full end-to-end process. It gives category teams the ability to design and optimize store layouts and shelf space with data-driven recommendations. 

Why Space Planning matters:

• Creates effective planograms
• Designing shelf layouts within a category
• Optimizing facings and adjacencies based on strategies
• Supporting resets and modular changes
• Improves planogram accuracy and consistency
• Tailoring shelf layouts by store cluster

Space Planning is focused on the vertical shelf view and is the main way of communicating how strategy meets execution at the shelf. 

Floor Planning

Floor Planning tools in Blue Yonder help visualize and organize overall store layouts beyond individual shelf sets, enabling teams to see and adjust the physical flow of space and inventory throughout a location.

Floor Planning provides a birds eye view of the store, helping teams design and optimize the overall layout across departments, categories, aisles, and total store space. It supports strategic placement that align with shopper behavior, traffic flow, and merchandising priorities.

Why Floor Planning matters:

• Creates optimized floorplans
• Connects the architectural (CAD/Revit) files to the Merchandising Strategy
• Designing store layouts and remodels that meet customer needs
• Allocating space across departments
• Visualizing total store strategies
• Supporting seasonal transitions
• Testing layout scenarios

Other Applications in the Blue Yonder suite

Category Knowledge Base

The Category Knowledge Base, or CKB, centralizes product, store, cluster, performance, and planogram information into one shared repository and relational database. It serves as the hub of the Category Management Solution Suite by unifying data from multiple sources and maintaining the relationships of Product, Fixture, Planogram, Store Layout and Store. 

Teams gain a consistent foundation for planning decisions, improve cross-functional collaboration, and reduce errors caused by disconnected data sets.

Planogram Generator

Planogram Generator, also called PG in Blue Yonder, is a less commonly used tool because of its complexity – but it is a wonderful powerful one! PG accelerates planogram creation by applying rules, space constraints, and category logic to generate recommended layouts. This reduces manual work, increases accuracy and consistency, and enables planners to output compliant planograms more rapidly across multiple stores or clusters.

Assortment Optimization (Strategic Assortment)

Strategic Assortment is the latest, SaaS native, assortment solution in support of the Category Management process. It helps category teams define strategies, consumer decision trees (CDTs), and apply to specific business rules in order to create space-aware assortments that are ready for planogram development.  The solution refines what products should be carried in each store or cluster by blending performance data, shopper behavior insights, and strategic goals. The result is a more tailored and profitable SKU mix that aligns with localized demand and space availability.

Channel Clustering (Store Insights)

Clustering groups stores and channels based on shared characteristics – such as shopper behavior, performance trends, and store attributes – so teams can build assortments and space plans that reflect real differences in demand. Clustering promotes consistency while still enabling localized strategy.

Space Automation Professional

Space Automation Professional, also known as SA Pro in Blue Yonder, helps category teams reduce repetitive work and improve consistency through automation tools. By codifying rules and logic, planners can streamline space planning tasks, maintain compliance, and focus more time on strategic decisions that drive growth.  The solution is a robust tool based on Microsoft Visual Studio and allows for automation routines to be developed in support of Category Management functions.

Looking ahead at Blue Yonder

Blue Yonder is evolving toward a cloud-native, AI-enhanced category management platform, identified as Cognitive Solutions, that support continuous planning, deeper automation, and real-time responsiveness. The future roadmap emphasizes:

• SaaS delivery for more flexibility and scalability.
• AI-driven workflows and insights to speed decision-making and improve accuracy.
• Deeper integration across space, assortment, and performance data.

The cognitive platform vision aims to adopt the latest in Platform and AI technology to help teams work faster, adapt more quickly to shopper trends, and gain a competitive edge through connected category and space planning processes. They have started implementing these updates in other supply chain areas, with Category Management Solutions beginning to roll out this year. Reach out to the team to learn more.