Impressive under the hood, impactful everywhere: Manhattan Associates TMS

Companies and organizations developing applications over the past decade have set the bar very high. Huge disruptive companies that dominate entire industries have set standards of usability and convenience that all other organizations must try to meet in order to stay competitive. The likes of Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo offer ease of use combined with powerful technological foundations. Together, they’ve changed the way people run their lives – and companies that can’t pivot and adapt are lagging behind.

Of course, these big players continue to innovate and push the boundaries, so competing companies must do the same. Examining the technology behind the big disruptors shows impressive levels of R&D and engineering, but consumers and businesses don’t choose suppliers or vendors based on engineering excellence: it’s the best customer experience or the most impactful business outcome that makes people choose one product over another.

For companies involved in the supply chain, logistics, warehousing and / or distribution, the constant search for improvement and innovation is a particular imperative. For example, three-day delivery as the definition of “express” has gone from one day to the same day – in the space of two or three years perhaps. Businesses that are unwilling or unable to innovate and deliver better experiences and services will be shunned for those that can. This is true not only for logistics, but also across the business, from customer service to support, operations and communications.

Coming out of the shadow of inheritance

Transport and logistics operations will have built up portfolios of technological solutions that underpin their activities, representing significant investments. To achieve the elasticity and scalability required in 2021, the cloud offers a seemingly logical step. While many legacy solutions can be transplanted from static on-premises installations to cloud installations, relocating legacy applications does not address critical limitations.

Cloud-native software designed for deployment in the cloud, using microservices and rapidly deployed code, gives businesses immediate service scalability – peaks in demand are easily assimilated and during quieter times, unused resources are n do not add to the costs.

Legacy applications, especially one-off products installed to meet a specific need in the past, rarely communicate effectively with each other. In fact, one of the areas of software growth is in integration platforms; an expense for many companies just trying to get different systems to communicate with each other.

Integration at the heart

Dedicated TMS solutions designed for the cloud, such as Manhattan Active â„¢ Transportation Management, offer a solution to the constraints of heritage solutions by unifying all the professions of modern logistics.

Unlike the big giant ERP systems of the big players (SAP, Oracle NetSuite, et al.), Manhattan Associates has three decades of supply chain leadership and omnichannel commerce in its blood.

As a cloud-built platform designed to provide powerful operational monitoring even in the most complex supply chain scenarios, TMS provides decision makers with near real-time data on every element of operations in every corner. of the company.

The largest data image

When taken holistically, information can be used to see trends, uncover bottlenecks, and improve efficiency. However, rather than being a purely statistical exercise, the information is presented in a way that focuses on outcomes that increase the quality of the customer experience and improve service levels.

Small logistics companies are currently unable to compete with much bigger competitors in the same space: large companies that can offer SLAs based on results from expensive data mining systems.

Manhattan Associates’ TMS brings these enterprise-level data-driven operational standards to any logistics store, overseeing distribution, labor, transportation, and automation at a granular level. The system monitors and fine-tunes operations, enabling users to deliver ever-improving service with increasing reliability.

The Manhattan ActiveTM integrates with your existing WMS and works with existing systems which represent a significant investment. Manhattan’s modular design and cloud architecture means its system can be scaled to reach all of the company’s operational centers, providing unified end-to-end visibility into actionable information. No other platform offers so much information, or so much data that is directly applicable to operations.

Conclusion

Whether your business operates nationally or internationally, whether it is an inbound or outbound specialist, a single carrier, or multimodal, the Manhattan Active Transportation Management system delivers results in procurement, modeling, shipping planning, resource management, tracking and traceability, and corporate financial operations.

The differences with Manhattan stem from the company’s long experience in the industry, technical excellence, and the use of the latest scalable and elastic cloud frameworks in development and deployment. The benefits are felt both by the company and by its customers.

To learn more about Manhattan Associates’ state-of-the-art TMS, read more in this document, and schedule a demo to see for yourself.