Woolworths Group is Australia and New Zealand’s largest retailer. Founded in 1924, the Group operates more than 1,700 stores across its core brands—including Woolworths Supermarkets, Woolworths New Zealand, and BIG W—serving more than 25 million customers every week. To manage this massive retail scale and deliver stock availability for customers, Woolworths Group relies on its dedicated supply chain and logistics arm, Primary Connect. While serving the core Woolworths Group retail network, Primary Connect also operates as a commercial logistics partner called Primary Connect+, supporting more than 1,300 external business partners.
Historia de éxito
Primary Connect
Transportation Planner, Transportation Management, Warehouse Management
Primary Connect automates load planning and achieves significant lift in vehicle utilization with Blue Yonder
La compañía
El desafío empresarial
Managing a national transport operation of Primary Connect’s scale requires precision, visibility, and execution speed. As freight volumes and operational complexities increased, Primary Connect found that its legacy manual planning processes could no longer keep pace with the dynamic demands of the network. The reliance on manual routing led to unrealized efficiency gains, highly compressed scheduling windows, and persistent planning challenges.
La solución
Primary Connect partnered with Blue Yonder to implement its advanced transport and warehouse solutions, ensuring a resilient, end-to-end supply chain. Blue Yonder Transportation Planner was deployed to automatically build highly efficient load plans and routes based on the logistics provider’s specific rules and operational requirements. This layer of automated planning sits seamlessly on top of Primary Connect’s existing supply chain environment, where Blue Yonder Transportation Management (TMS) and Blue Yonder Warehouse Management (WMS) already work together. The integration of these three solution areas creates a unified, end-to-end workflow from initial planning through to warehouse-floor execution, yielding significant gains in operational efficiency, environmental sustainability, and overall supply chain resilience.
“Bringing Blue Yonder Transportation Planner, Blue Yonder TMS, and Blue Yonder WMS together has transformed how our supply chain operates, giving us a seamless flow from planning to execution. It also unlocks the efficiency and consistency we simply could not have achieved before.”
–Carolyn Schroten, National Optimization Manager, Primary Connect
The operation that moves Primary Connect
Primary Connect operates one of the largest food, grocery, and retail supply chains in the Southern Hemisphere. This complex network extends across Australia and New Zealand, incorporating road, rail, and ocean transport services alongside state-of-the-art regional and national distribution centers.
Its transport operations span thousands of delivery lanes, multiple temperature-controlled zones, and a robust mix of primary fleet and external carriers. In total, the metropolitan network manages the movement of 10 million pallets of product annually. To manage this scale, Blue Yonder Transportation Planner plays a central role by building optimized inbound and outbound routes and passing planned orders directly to warehouse operations. This tight integration keeps distribution centers and transport fleets running in perfect alignment.
“Automating transport planning has unlocked a level of efficiency and consistency we couldn’t reach manually. Blue Yonder Transportation Planner is now a cornerstone of how our network delivers for the business every day,” says Schroten.
Confronting transport optimization challenges
Before activating Blue Yonder Transportation Planner, Primary Connect faced long-standing challenges in optimizing its daily transport routes. As the network modernized and expanded, the window of time to build accurate, cost-effective plans shrank.
Every morning, starting at 3 a.m., store orders drop into the system, triggering the daily transport planning process. With warehouse picking starting just three hours later at 6 a.m., planners historically faced high-pressure, manual work as they built, reviewed, and locked in transport routes. This process was heavily dependent on individual site expertise, making it difficult to scale and vulnerable to variability. Primary Connect required a systematic, scalable, and automated approach.
From operational readiness to real-world efficiency gains
To ensure a smooth transition, a dedicated Blue Yonder Professional Services team was embedded onsite with Primary Connect. The team collaborated closely with the company’s internal leads to translate Primary Connect’s complex operating rules into a robust system configuration. Before going live, Primary Connect and Blue Yonder conducted a joint three-month desktop simulation. Using historical data, they tested Blue Yonder Transportation Planner against real-world constraints, such as driver fatigue laws, carrier capacities, and receiving windows, focusing on two core KPIs: kilometers per pallet and transport cost.
The solution was first launched in Adelaide, which served as an ideal pilot site due to its streamlined metropolitan operations. Following this success, the rollout progressed to Perth, where Blue Yonder Transportation Planner immediately proved its value. Primary Connect recorded a sustained 2-3% lift in vehicle utilization, with peak efficiency gains of up to 5%.
“These results confirm that the team nailed the strategy and the rules guiding the planning logic. They also demonstrate the strength of that logic across a broader set of operating conditions and contribute to Primary Connect’s sustainability goals,” says Schroten.
Today, Primary Connect has successfully deployed the Blue Yonder solution across eight of its major sites, with more in the pipeline. Currently, more than 90% of load plans are fully automated through Blue Yonder Transportation Planner.
As the solution continues to roll out across the Eastern Seaboard, Primary Connect is observing widespread improvements, including enhanced store stock availability, more consistent delivery schedules, and improved backhaul efficiency. By using automated backhaul logic, returning trucks are systematically scheduled to pick up salvage assets—such as empty pallets and milk crates—on their return trips to the distribution centers. “As a result, we are helping service our stores more effectively by ensuring they are not left with excess salvage assets,” says Schroten.
Elevating planning operations through automation
“Regarding the value of Blue Yonder Transportation Planner, there were several ‘aha’ moments, especially when our executive team saw the positive business impacts. Automating this process has transformed the team’s day-to-day experience, reduced operational variability, and strengthened their skills and confidence as they take a more proactive, analytics-supported approach to decision-making,” says Schroten.
By systemizing transport activities through consistent, rule-based logic, Primary Connect has built significant resilience into its operations. This automation has freed skilled planners from repetitive administrative tasks, empowering them to focus on higher-value initiatives such as managing exceptions, improving carrier relations, and driving continuous improvement.
Advancing operations through smarter, structured planning
Primary Connect is continuing to roll out Blue Yonder Transportation Planner across its remaining logistics network while iteratively refining its planning parameters. The team also plans to conduct post-implementation reviews at early sites to capture minor, incremental improvements that, when scaled across the entire network, equal major efficiency gains.
With a data-driven, systematic foundation now established, Primary Connect is well-positioned to drive future innovations in efficiency, service delivery, and supply chain sustainability.
