The news: Kuehne+Nagel is moving its warehouse management system to a cloud platform built on Blue Yonder software, across more than 1,000 sites in close to 100 countries.
That includes roughly three-quarters of the company’s warehouses. The rollout started in April, and the first customer site goes live in Asia this month.
What changes: A warehouse management system runs the floor, tracking where inventory sits, how orders get picked and how work is assigned.
Today those systems vary site by site. On one platform, a customer with warehouses in five countries gets the same process everywhere. Kuehne+Nagel can also bring new sites online faster.
“This shift supports consistent execution at scale,” said Eduardo Razuck, who runs the contract logistics unit.
The competition: GXO and DHL Supply Chain are chasing the same standardization. Both companies are adding AI and robot orchestration software on top of the systems each warehouse already uses. Kuehne+Nagel is replacing the underlying system itself.
The catch: One platform means one point of failure. Blue Yonder was hit by ransomware in late 2024. The outage disrupted scheduling at Starbucks and operations at two UK grocers.
The rollout is also part of a cost-cutting program. Kuehne+Nagel said earlier this year it would cut 2,000 jobs as technology reduces the amount of work.
