ProMat 2009: For Manhattan Associates, it’s all about the platform

ERP for the supply chain. That’s one way to think about Manhattan Associates approach to the supply chain execution space, according to Fred Brown, the Manhattan vice president on hand in Chicago at ProMat 2009 last week.

For those of you who don’t follow the WMS market, Manhattan is the leading supplier of supply chain execution solutions.

“One of the big changes we’ve seen is that our customers are trying to move away from thinking in silos,” Brown told me. “That’s being driven by strategies like lean manufacturing that they’re now extending to lean logistics. The question is how do you protect the value add that happens in manufacturing as a product moves from the plant through the supply chain.”

Manhattan’s answer, according to Brown, is a logistics, or supply chain, platform. “We stepped back and looked at the ERP vendors,” he said. “They’re value was the ability to share common information across a common platform with a common look and feel. We realized that no one had taken that concept to do a supply chain platform. Our idea is that, yes, our customers operate departments, but what they’re really trying to do is enable a bigger business process. They can do that with a supply chain platform.”

That business process is the fulfillment of an order. The idea is to create the technology, the supply chain platform, that can support that process with solutions that go across all the different silos. Warehouse management is still Manhattan’s core product, but their suite today also includes supply chain planning, transportation management, and collaborative tools, to name a few.

Who is looking for a supply chain execution platform? Brown says its companies engaged in “transformation projects.” Those are projects that look beyond what happens in the transportation department or the warehouse and instead focus on the total logistics cost to serve the customer. To get that kind of big picture view, you need a solution that is integrated across processes, with all application on one data model.

“Our focus is to get aligned with companies going through this transformation,” says Brown.