Today’s priorities for supply chain leaders

Over the last three years, the main focus for many supply chain leaders has been resiliency. Disruptions have been rife, with the chain of events starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing with the blockage of the Suez Canal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and leading to the impacts of the Red Sea attacks this year.

Resilience can mean different things, from the ability to continue buying inventory and delivering products to schedule, to simply maintaining profit margins. Ultimately, it is about being able to adapt quickly to unforeseen challenges.

Source: Unsplash

A key takeaway from the supply chain disruptions is that the backbone of business resiliency is cost management. At the start of the pandemic, transportation costs increased dramatically, and shippers were buying inventories wherever they could find them. US business logistics costs rose by a record 19.6 percent in 2022, and half of that increase was due to inventory carrying costs.

To remain successful, logistics decision-makers must prioritize both resiliency and cost management. The former means being dynamic and agile, requiring connectedness and real-time data. The latter means reducing expenditure, as high inventory levels and fulfillment & transportation costs could otherwise dent profitability. This is where a unified supply chain helps.

What is a unified supply chain?

Traditionally, in supply chains, transportation and distribution have been managed separately. This siloed approach often led to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for optimization across the entire network. A unified supply chain is an integrated approach to managing all its aspects, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products. Components such as distribution, transportation, labor management, and automation work as a cohesive system, usually through a single app. This enables real-time visibility and collaboration across the supply chain network, eliminating silos and redundancy.

At a software level, the Transport Management System (TMS) needs to be connected to the Yard and Warehouse Management System (WMS) to improve operational efficiency. Managers can quickly and easily add capacity, adjust labor to match inbound arrivals, and change orders up to the point that a truck leaves the depot. Such integration streamlines operations, reduces costs, and enhances agility, allowing companies to react quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands.

The benefits of bringing the TMS and WMS together

To achieve a unified supply chain, companies invest in cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, best built from microservices to enable easy integration and scalability. By adopting adaptable and boundary-less solutions, organizations can ensure rapid innovation, personalized customization, and enhanced connectivity across all supply chain functions.

Source: Unsplash

However, according to a recent McKinsey study, logistics leaders have significant concerns regarding technology investment, mostly surrounding the cost of the solution and the impact of change management. Businesses ideally want to lower their total vendor footprint and tech TCO while still boosting their ROI. While these goals may seem at odds with each other, a unified supply chain can ultimately work to achieve them these goals.

A unified supply chain consolidates disparate systems, such as distribution and transport management into a single, integrated solution. Without the need for specialized software for each function, businesses significantly reduce their vendor footprint. This streamlining simplifies technology management and lowers the TCO associated with licensing, maintenance, and support.

Another key characteristic of the unified supply chain is its ease of implementation and adoption compared to traditional, siloed systems. A solution that can be up and running quickly reduces the time-to-value and increases the ROI. Moreover, this lowers support costs by minimizing the need for customization and integration.

Consider Manhattan Active

Manhattan, a leading provider of supply chain management solutions, is the only vendor of a unified supply chain offering. The Manhattan Active Platform gives managers total control over adjuestments for supply, demand, resources, and shipment variations, allowing them to think in terms of inbound and outbound rather than WMS and TMS.

With the platform’s microservices-based architecture and API-first approach, organizations can easily integrate and customize their solution, reducing implementation time and costs. Manhattan Active supports various developmental approaches, including low-code, no-code, and custom coding, enabling IT teams to tailor solutions precisely to their requirements with minimum dependency on external vendors.

Instead of high-cost development to alter monolithic applications, internal teams can easily tune the platform to suit end-users’ requirements quickly and iterate on improvements according to need. And because the platform is cloud-based, core functionality is not affected.

By leveraging computational and behavioral intelligence, the platform optimizes decision-making processes and workforce productivity, ultimately driving cost savings and revenue growth. Manhattan’s cloud-native SaaS model eliminates the need for on-premises infrastructure, reducing maintenance and support costs while increasing scalability and accessibility. Continuous updates every 90 days ensure access to the latest capabilities without additional investment.

To learn more about how bringing together your TMS and WMS into a unified supply chain could transform your business, contact the expert Manhattan team today.

The post What is a unified supply chain, and what are the benefits? appeared first on TechHQ.

Companies and organizations developing applications over the last ten years have had the bar raised very high. Huge disruptive companies that dominate whole sectors have set standards in usability and convenience that every other organization must try and meet to remain competitive. The likes of Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo provide ease of use combined with powerful technological underpinnings. Together, these have changed the way people lead their lives — and companies unable to pivot and adapt are falling behind the curve.

Of course, those large players continue to innovate and push the envelope further, so competing companies need to do the same. Looking at the technology that underpins the big disruptors shows impressive levels of R&D and engineering, but consumers and businesses do not choose suppliers or vendors based on engineering excellence: it’s the best customer experience or the most impactful business outcome that makes people select one product over another.

For companies involved in supply chain, logistics, warehousing and/or distribution, the continuing drive for improvement and innovation are particular imperatives. As a single example, three-day delivery as a definition of “express” has transitioned from one day to same day — in the space of maybe two or three years. Companies unwilling or unable to innovate and offer better experiences and service will be shunned for those who can. This is true not just for logistics, but also across the business, from customer care to support, operations, and communications.

Stepping out of legacy’s shadow

Transport and logistics operations will have built up portfolios of technology solutions that underpin their businesses, representing significant investment. To achieve the elasticity and scalability required in 2021, the cloud offers a seemingly logical step. While many legacy solutions can be transplanted from on-premise, static installations onto cloud facilities, re-homing legacy applications does not address critical limitations.

Cloud-native software architected for cloud deployment, using microservices and quickly deployed code, gives companies immediate scalability of services — peaks in demand are easily assimilated, and during quieter periods, resources not used don’t add to cost burdens.

Legacy applications, especially point-products installed to fulfill a specific need in the past, rarely communicate with each other efficiently. In fact, one of the growth areas in software is in integration platforms; an expense for many companies that are simply trying to get different systems to talk to one another.

Integration at the heart

Dedicated TMS solutions engineered for the cloud, like Manhattan Active Transportation Management, offer a solution to the constraints of legacy solutions by unifying all parts of the modern logistics business.

Unlike large, behemoth ERP systems from the big players (SAP, Oracle NetSuite, et al.) Manhattan Associates has three decades of supply chain and omnichannel commerce leadership running through its bloodstream.

As a platform built on the cloud and designed to provide powerful operational oversight in even the most complex supply chain scenarios, the TMS gives decision-makers near real-time data as to every element of operations in every corner of the business.

The bigger data picture

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

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

The Manhattan Associates TMS brings those enterprise-level data-driven operational standards to any logistics shop, overseeing distribution, labor, transport, and automation at a granular level. The system monitors and fine-tunes operations, allowing users to offer an ever-improving service with greater and greater reliability.

The Manhattan Active TM integrates with your existing WMS and works alongside legacy systems that represent significant investment. Manhattan’s modular design and cloud architecture mean its system can be expanded to reach all operational centers of the business, providing unified, end-to-end visibility onto actionable information. No other platform offers insights to this extent, nor so much data that is directly applicable to operations.

Conclusion

Whether your company operates domestically or internationally, is an inbound or outbound specialist, uses a single carrier, or is multi-modal, the Manhattan Active Transportation Management system drives results in procurement, modeling, shipment planning, resource management, track and trace, and the financial operations of the business.

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

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

The post Impressive Under the Hood, Impactful Everywhere: Manhattan Associates TMS appeared first on TechHQ.

The problems inherent in some technology investments only come to light when organizations try to reflect a significant business change in their expensive software or hardware platforms. Common junctures are after a merger or acquisition between logistics and supply chain companies, when the business must grow quickly, or when they decide to break new ground into a different territory or market. Trying to adapt older technology to serve new situations in today’s fulfillment and transport businesses proves to be a significant headache. In some cases, many inherent problems come to light that weren’t massive issues: the sort of issues that people “put up with” in the past but are raised because of decision-makers’ focus on a misfiring technology stack.

The biggest bugbears come from changing multiple point products so they might work together more effectively or from monolithic systems (like ERP platforms) that are cumbersome — and expensive — to adapt. In many cases, bespoke changes already made to legacy systems impede further progress and certainly stop a business from being truly agile. Then too, there are the problems associated with data silos in a business, and therefore the inherent difficulties integrating these silos into wide supply chain eco-systems.

Traditional transport and logistics management systems may have been conceived and developed before many of the current must-haves for companies in the sector appeared. For example, software and hardware created before the era of omnichannel retail make the “normalities” of returns and purchases mixed between online and brick and mortar hugely problematic to cope with operationally.

Similarly, it’s common for user interfaces to have been created before the age of the iPhone. That means non-standard look and feel, apps not optimized for mobile (or even a modern browser), and technology that users need to be trained to use to get the simplest work done. In the back end, levels of responsiveness and user feedback will perform as poorly as their garbled user interfaces suggest.

The promise of technology in omnichannel retail, supply chain, warehouse management, order management, and transportation management software is undeniable. However, in many cases, that promise struggles to live up to customer and user expectations of what is considered excellence. Yet some of today’s solutions go little beyond vehicle telemetry or warehouse stock metrics — quite the feats of engineering in the early days of sat nav and bar code scanning but table stakes in today’s game. In 2021, prioritization of price and speed couples with the unspoken demand for high-quality customer experiences; and to be frank, solutions from a previous era are no longer a viable answer.

If we look under the hood of legacy systems to find out why they are lacking, then doing the same for today’s cutting-edge logistics and supply chain tech reveals why its users’ companies excel. The software from Manhattan Associates is built on cloud-native, microservices technology. This genus of development and deployment methodology was conceived to take full advantage of cloud deployment. Microservices (or containers) are discreet subsections of software that can be replicated, multiplied, and torn down in milliseconds, according to the demands placed on the application. That has two significant advantages for those smart enough to pursue its adoption: firstly, cloud hosting costs are based on actual usage, not on the premise of “over-specify and hope.” Secondly, the platform is extensible and scalable according to need.

Manhattan provides the sector with the tools it needs available when they are needed, with no requirement for months of bespoke development work to add “modules” to large ERPs, and without creating another data silo, inaccessible to the rest of the business.

Implementation is quick and seamless, with the cloud platform integrating easily with existing in-house systems and interfacing with third parties safely and easily. That software model creates insights and information drawn from data anywhere in the business or supplied by outside parties (like supply chain partners), so decision-makers get the information they need from a central source.

The Manhattan platform is not called Manhattan Active Transport Management for no reason: its ethos is to enable stakeholders to have instant access to information via responsive dashboards on multiple platforms. It’s from those sources where real-time monitoring of all systems and business processes identifies anomalies and bottlenecks in everyday procedures.

The underlying basis of containerized services that replicate and scale on-demand means answers pulled in fast from the entire network of systems and supply chain data. Similarly, companies can dedicate resources to the analysis of real-time data, with AI algorithms self-improving and fine-tuning the solution for maximum efficiency.

Finally, the user interface and overall responsiveness of the applications give a truly modern feel that users will already be familiar with, so even complex operations become simpler, and collaboration second nature.

In a further article on Tech HQ, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into the Manhattan Associates Active Transport Management platform, drawing out some of the detail of how the solution works and the positive impact it makes on all areas of operations in this highly competitive industry. With a combination of cutting-edge technology and logistics experience, the Manhattan difference will be clear.

In the meantime, to learn more about the positive steps your organization can take, follow this link to get in touch with a representative today.

The post Under the hood of the old and new: Transport Management software today appeared first on TechHQ.