Building A Future-ready Supply Chain: The Power Of Innovation And Unification

After two years of virtual meetings, the greatest minds in the supply chain commerce industry were brought together once in person at Manhattan Associates’ annual Momentum user conference where customers, partners, and industry experts discussed topics such as the critical role supply chains play to keep businesses moving, the latest solutions to industry challenges, and how we must all become agents of change to help our organisations and our planet succeed, now and in the future.

However, one topic of discussion echoed throughout during the three-day event – the benefits of foundational technology that unifies supply chain commerce capabilities. Modern, cloud-native technology is the key to unified solutions to work together instead of silos, offering customers complete visibility into their product’s journey.

From order placement to shipment, to delivery, a seamless supply chain is only possible when systems like warehouse and transportation work seamlessly with each other in real-time. Manhattan Active Supply Chain solutions were purposely built with this in mind, and the Manhattan Active Platform technology they run on was engineered entirely from microservices for speed of innovation, extensibility, scalability, and availability.

Manhattan Active solutions aren’t just powerful, they are also easy to personalise. Manhattan announced enhancements to their developer portal and Manhattan ProActive, their WYSIWYG tool for creating extensions and customisations, making it faster and easier than ever to get the most out of Manhattan Active solutions.

Manhattan reiterated their hyper-focus on empowering organisations with a wide variety of technical acumen, with their platform and solutions that support ‘no code, low code, and your code,’ personalization. It was a mantra that was echoed on multiple occasions and discussed in its own session, creating enough buzz for people to pull chairs from outside of the room to hear from company experts!

But what does it really mean? In simple terms, customers can customise their Manhattan Active solution experiences in whatever manner best meets their organisation’s skills and strategies.

• No code: For customers who have limited developer resources, Manhattan already provides the most feature-rich application in the industry, packed with intuitive guides, simple configurations, and experience options. Most of the capabilities that customers need already exist in the solutions and are governed by business user-driven configurability.
• Low code: Manhattan has developed intuitive technical tools designed for the tech-savvy business user. These technical development and configuration tools enable capabilities like layout and field changes to the user interface, extensions to the data model, and management of external integrations.
• Your code: The Manhattan Active Platform provides easy access to hundreds of APIs and tens of thousands of API endpoints, allowing customers to combine their secret sauce with Manhattan’s, to create something truly unique and differentiating.

In his opening keynote, Manhattan Associates president and CEO Eddie Capel emphasised, ‘that change is the only constant.’ Manhattan is the lead agent of change for customers who want to evolve faster and prepare for future needs. It has done so by reinventing a market-leading order management system five years ago, the top warehouse management system two years ago, and the leading transportation management system just last year. He referred to the Manhattan Active® platform as the ‘technology cornerstone for transformational change, and its ability to reshape business outcomes and customer experiences.’

Sanjeev Siotia, CTO of Manhattan Associates, provided more insight into the platform by explaining that ‘in order for our customers to succeed, legacy system barriers had to be eliminated.’ Manhattan Active Platform’s state-of-the-art microservices-based architecture allows supply chain commerce to be broken down into discrete functional components that can be assembled to create new experiences and solutions faster than ever before. This unifying technology platform removes duplication and redundancy because every component is part of a shared application platform, that is seamlessly updated with new features every 90 days.

Simply put, with Manhattan Active solutions, the customer never has to upgrade again and can do so with zero downtime. They are fully extensible, and automatically and seamlessly upgrade every 90 days to provide the customer with the latest technology available. And, with its ‘no code, low code, your code’ capabilities, it is safe to say that Manhattan Active solutions offer the most flexible options in the industry for personalising and extending supply chain commerce capabilities.

In the end, we live in a constantly changing world and these mission critical solutions should be designed to not only keep up with change but to anticipate it and embrace it. The overall goal is simple: to equip customers with unimpeded technology innovation, provide exceptional supply chain commerce capabilities and the freedom to personalize solutions, and unequaled support at every step of the way. After all, it’s your supply chain. Unified.