How Blue Yonder uses GitHub

Blue Yonder, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based digital supply chain management software company, transformed its development process by migrating from self-hosted Bitbucket to GitHub Enterprise as part of a broader cloud transformation initiative.

Company Overview

Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
Industry: Software and Services
Employees: 1,400+

Blue Yonder makes digital supply chain management software to help clients around the world deliver products more efficiently. The company serves supply chains across retail, manufacturing, and logistics.

The Challenge

Blue Yonder was managing self-hosted installations of Bitbucket, which had accumulated significant technical debt. The company needed a cloud-based solution that would let teams focus on supply chain optimization rather than infrastructure management.

The Solution

GitHub Enterprise addressed Blue Yonder's technical debt and enabled a successful migration of its CI/CD pipeline to the cloud. According to Blue Yonder's senior project director Jennifer Ricks, GitHub met their legal and security requirements better than other vendors, offering superior visibility and control of user permissions and access controls.

Accelerating Deployments with GitHub Actions

While Blue Yonder initially viewed GitHub as a code management tool, it became central to their development process. The company operates on a philosophy that Gabriel Kohen, senior principal software engineer, describes as: "don't let a human do a machine's job."

Historically, Blue Yonder used Jenkins servers internally for CI/CD, but these had limited, non-elastic capacity. During two-week code sprints, developers would experience bottlenecks—sometimes waiting hours for jobs to run when many developers committed code simultaneously before sprint reviews and demos.

GitHub Actions eliminated this constraint. "I don't have to think about capacity anymore," Kohen says. Developers can run unlimited numbers of Actions in parallel. While Blue Yonder explored moving Jenkins to managed cloud services, maintaining CI/CD instances still carried hidden operational costs that don't exist with GitHub.

Deployment Impact

Some projects still use Jenkins, but all new projects rely primarily on GitHub for CI/CD. When teams need additional features, GitHub Actions makes it easy to build custom solutions or find pre-built ones via the marketplace. For example, Blue Yonder created an Action that automatically pushes code to QA or production based on commit comments in a GitOps fashion.

The results are dramatic:

• Deployments now take approximately 30 minutes using API and automation, down from a full day
• Blue Yonder now performs around 100 deploys per week, up from about 10

Securing the Supply Chain

GitHub's automation tools also strengthen Blue Yonder's security posture. The company uses GitHub CodeQL for automated static application security testing (SAST), which Kohen credits with producing higher-quality code and fewer false positives than other SAST products they've used.

"What we liked about CodeQL is that we didn't see a lot of false positives," Kohen says. "It also makes recommendations for best practices in code. It goes beyond just security, which is really cool."

Combined with automated code scanning, the faster deployment cycle means developers receive feedback quickly and can respond to bugs, vulnerabilities, and customer requests much faster. "We wouldn't have these tight feedback loops without GitHub," Kohen says.

Faster Onboarding

GitHub has also accelerated employee onboarding. New hires can be productive and deploying code in as little as 36 hours, compared to up to two weeks previously.

Part of this speed comes from GitHub's ease of use, but familiarity plays a major role. As the world's largest host of open source repositories, many developers already know how to use GitHub when they join. This reduces training time significantly.

Open Source and Developer Culture

Many developers view their open source contributions on GitHub as part of their professional portfolio. This benefits Blue Yonder's hiring process. "It helps me see how serious a person is," Kohen says. "For example, automated testing is paramount for my team so I like to see whether someone writes tests. I think it says a lot about how you write code."

Blue Yonder has been increasing its own open source contributions in recent years, particularly in the Python community. The company maintains projects including Turbodbc, a database access module, and Tsfresh, a time series extraction tool.

"People like to be recognized for their craft," Kohen says. "Open source is a way to demonstrate what you've been doing in your career." Beyond career recognition, open source improves software quality and security. "When you write something for only one customer, or for yourself, it's less tested. When you put something out there and it's free for anyone to use, you'll have people pointing out bugs and issues. With open source, you get more users and therefore more testing and more confidence."

Blue Yonder applies open source principles internally as well. Every employee has read access to all company repositories, making it easier for developers to discover and build on solutions others have created. Any employee can create pull requests and contribute improvements. "Anybody can shamelessly use anyone else's ideas," Kohen says. "And in the end, we are all better for it."