Eddie Capel, President & CEO

“Today, growing consumer expectations are placing increased pressure on retail enterprises to fulfill higher order volumes at faster speeds,” substantiates Vikas Aron, Director-Product Management, Manhattan Associates. Solving these impediments is the SCM Wizard, Manhattan Associates. The Atlanta, GA-based firm is a global leader in providing supply chain execution and collaborative commerce solutions, which leverage state-of-the-art technologies, innovative practices, and its domain expertise to enhance performance, profitability, and competitive advantage. “We design, build and deliver market-leading Supply Chain Commerce Solutions that drive top line growth by converging front-end sales with back-end supply chain execution and efficiency,” says Capel.

Bringing Convergence and Visibility

Manhattan’s supply chain suite has been architected to break down silos and allow the supply chain to serve high growth without sacrificing bottom-line performance. The suite primarily consists of five elements—carrier management, distribution management, transportation management, supply chain convergence, and visibility. Through these elements, the firm assists its customers in effectively bridging the gap between digital and brick-and-mortar selling by allowing them to extend their supply chain aisle. According to Capel, “Supply chains must become more than efficiency tools that push products to market and drive costs out of an organization. They must help companies get closer to their customers; they must drive profitable commerce.”

One of the recent benefiters of the state-of-the-art suite was Urban Outfitters.

Supply chains must become more than efficiency tools that push products to market and drive costs out of an organization

Furthermore, the firm also explains that achieving omni-channel success is dependent upon having a sound distribution and logistics infrastructure in place, and yet the importance of having a good Transportation Management System (TMS) is surprisingly misunderstood. The firm’s TMS software offers the scope of solutions that an organization needs to run a comprehensive and integrated system. Fully cloud-enabled, the solution-set is available in multiple deployment structures, including multi-tenant, private hosted, on-premise, or hybrid options. Manhattan’s TMS provides exceptional information such as shipment delay that can be used to determine a new source for an order and dynamically relocate inventory in real life time. The sophisticated TMS provides inbound visibility to store routes to assist schedule/forecast store labor, enhancing the ability to leverage store replenishment routes for online distribution channel-to-store and store-to-store transfers.

TMS coupled with Manhattan’s distribution software automates every link in even the most complex supply chains. Also, anchored by their industry-leading warehouse management solutions, Manhattan Associates’ distribution management provides a comprehensive set of supply chain execution solutions to help organizations connect inbound and outbound operations, increase product velocity, improve customer service, and achieve world-class efficiency across an organization’s distribution network.

Innovation has been a key element in the firm’s methodology to improve their suite continually. Capel feels that the hyper-acceleration of sophisticated consumer technology and omni-channel customer behavior is redefining commerce, and a successful navigation of this novel commerce landscape requires technology that can effectively enable omni-channel supply chain optimization. Through their new fangled mobile solutions, the firm is helping its clients modernize and mobilize nearly every touch point of their supply chains, including warehouse management, mobile Point of Sale (mPoS) implementation, and customer engagement, in an effort to bring eCommerce into the store.

"Growing consumer expectations are placing increased pressure on retail enterprises to fulfill higher order volumes at faster speeds"

The firm has been tackling many customer and industry-specific challenges head-on with a long-term and forward-looking investment in product excellence, R&D innovation, and strategic alliances, with leading firms such as Cognizant. Through their partnership with Cognizant, Manhattan Associates brings customers best-in-class solutions for supply chain package implementation and other complementary services that optimize return on investment and mitigate risk. Cognizant’s business consulting teams leverage Manhattan’s innovative offerings to benefit customers in multi-channel retailing, consumer goods manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, third-party logistics, and wholesale distribution industries.

Manhattan also proffers customer support and maintenance programs to ensure that its customers stay up to speed with the firm’s product developments and obtain the highest performance possible. Manhattan focuses on creating a targeted service program that meets its clientele’s specific business goals and requirements.

The Journey Ahead

Manhattan Associates has been delivering many more critical pieces for companies to become omni-channel commerce-ready. As hinted by Capel during the keynote at Momentum 2016, the firm has been working along the lines of optimized planning and execution and synchronized operations using predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools. Bi-directional constraint awareness and related optimization capabilities should result in a more profitable omni-channel execution.

Manhattan has come a long way from a conservative and constantly profitable provider of WMS software to a provider of an SCM software platform that enables omni-channel commerce. Today, Manhattan designs, builds, and delivers market-leading supply chain commerce solutions for customers around the globe. The firm has been driving the commerce revolution with unmatched insight and unrivaled technology, and also plans to do that in future. By connecting front-end revenue and relationships with back-end execution and efficiency, optimized on a common technology platform, the firm is all set to inscribe the next version of the supply chain.