Exchange 2024: Man and machine harmonisation

Everywhere one moved at the Hyatt Regency Barcelona Tower, the message was reinforced: man and machine in harmony.

From the staff helping guests navigate the sensitive lift buttons to the networking room hospitality team standing attentively by the coffee machines ready to give a new dimension to ‘self-serve’, it was man and machine in harmony.

And at the Manhattan Exchange EMEA conference itself, the topic gained legs. Despite ongoing societal fears technology and automation is taking the jobs of people, the evidence from the theatres, innovation centre, and conversations in lobbies was that man and machine sit side by side in the rapid evolution of global commerce.

What was once predominantly a fear is now viewed as an opportunity by many.

Don’t get me wrong, the job displacement caused by technology is a real going concern in certain sectors and needs consideration and handling with care. But in what seems a growing majority of cases across retail and the wider supply chain commerce landscape, technology is helping people do things better, raising the intellectual standard of their daily working lives, and in some cases filling in where there are labour gaps.

GenAI for the workforce, for the consumer 

A clear example came in the keynote sessions from the Manhattan senior team on Tuesday morning. New Generative AI (GenAI)-powered tools were unveiled by CEO Eddie Capel and head of product management Brian Kinsella – one supporting staff in the world of supply chain and the other giving consumers a helping hand.

Manhattan Active Maven is a new chatbot retailers and brands can access to serve their customers better. Trained on Manhattan Active Omni's data which enables it to handle a wide range of inquiries, such as complex order changes, cancellations, returns, and exchanges, it’s more intelligent than the average chatbot.

Maven’s sophistication allows it to adapt conversations dynamically to customers' responses and needs, and is available for testing and implementing now. Meanwhile, internally, Manhattan Assist – another GenAI-powered offering built into every Manhattan product – can be leveraged to help users navigate the supply chain software more easily and ask really specific questions to support the work they are doing.

Referenced at Exchange 2023 in Cannes as a work in progress, one year later it’s now available for use to help speed up everyday processes and answer staff queries in the warehouse and through the supply chain.

Man and machine in harmony.

Co-op and Adidas 

Adidas Group senior director of IT operations, Manfred Schindler, and Co-op head of logistics implementation, Jon Friedlander, took to the Exchange stage after lunch and the message continued.

Schindler welcomed the advent of GenAI in commerce, saying the new tech capability can "make things happen" that previously were tried in the business but just weren't possible to pull off. He said how introducing automation and robotics in an Adidas warehouse in Germany is driving warehouse efficiency and supporting workers.

The robots take the burden off the workforce, who he says are typically aged between 50-60 years old and can now focus on more valuable tasks in a productive manner.

As for the UK grocer, which is currently part way through a Manhattan Active Warehouse Management implementation as it switches from data centres towards the cloud. The key message from Friedlander was this is much a people project as it is a tech one, with operations and implementation teams combining with a whole cross-section of supply chain staff to ensure the journey to new systems is as smooth as possible.

Chatting to retailers in the innovation centre, there was a lot of focus and keenness to introduce collaborative robots – or ‘cobots’ – into the warehouse “to get people used to seeing robotics in the workplace” and allaying potential fears about their impact. We’ve reached a point for most sizeable retailers, where it is a question of when not if this type of tech is going to be introduced to warehouse floors and yards across the globe.

Another fashion retailer taking part in the event said technology is being deployed in its stores to empower staff. Shop workers who were once told to “sell, not think” are now being encouraged to open their minds and have a greater say in how their stores are run – and it is Manhattan point-of-sale and clientelling software, revamped and reinforced with the launch of Iris in 2024, that can play a part in facilitating that evolution.

In a store world riddled with internet connectivity issues, Iris’s resiliency features enable staff to carry on with their tech-enabled tasks even when bandwidth drops and are yet another example of man and machine operating in harmony.

Unified commerce

The concept of “unified commerce” as the way of describing successful modern retail infrastructure continues to gain momentum, too, and was evident in the final keynote of the conference from L’Oreal IT program director Benoit Guelfucci.

L'Oréal has been on a transformative journey and is approaching the final stages of its global Manhattan Active Warehouse Management deployment. Once again, in the presentation, the idea of a transformation “powered by data“ was introduced – and the video accompanying Guelfucci’s keynote mentioned tech’s positive impact on people.

It is implemented “to reinforce their expertise through shifting to augmented distribution centres, fulfilment centres with machines allowing our teams to focus on value-added tasks like quality checks and gaining in speed”, the presentation said.

Elsewhere at the Exchange, the key news was Manhattan bringing planning and execution systems together with its Active Supply Chain Planning offering that combines two parts of the supply chain that historically have been disconnected. Through the integration of the two, the idea is that planning can more neatly inform execution strategy and vice versa in what Capel calls “a continuous planning system”.

Until now, planning has on the whole functioned in a store-centric manner but commerce is not quite so black and white any more – it’s complex and multichannel, with so many factors influencing demand. Planning systems need to be as agile as execution systems and – as Capel noted – to keep up with customer requirements, “the only way to do that is to have intelligent systems that talk to each other”.

Of course, it is those intelligent systems that will help people do their jobs more effectively. I repeat: man and machine working in harmony for a better outcome.