At Manhattan Associates’ ‘Exchange’ event in Antwerp, new CEO Eric Clark outlined a broad growth vision for the company’s supply chain solutions – extending well beyond its well-established warehouse management systems (WMS). Paul Dixon reports.
Clark (pictured, below), said Manhattan sees really strong growth opportunity across all five of its core product areas, which include WMS, transportation management (TMS), order management, point of sale, and supply chain planning.
“Warehouse management is the one that we are well known for – we’ve been in that space a long time and hold roughly a 20% market share,” Clark explained. “But across transportation, order management, point of sale, and supply chain planning, our share is still in the single digits, so there’s a lot of room to grow.”
Henri Seroux, Senior Vice President EMEA, added that even within its core WMS business, momentum remains strong, with both new customers and existing on-premises users migrating to cloud-based platforms. Increasingly, customers see value in integrating warehouse and transportation management to unlock greater ROI. “The two working together create very clear opportunities,” Seroux told us.
Brian Kinsella, Senior Vice President, Product Management also highlighted the potential in supply chain planning, describing it as an “underserved” but equally large market compared with supply chain execution. As more enterprises shift their ERP systems to the cloud – particularly those moving to SAP S/4HANA – many are re-evaluating their tech stack and turning to Manhattan for more advanced forecasting and planning capabilities.
“We’re seeing more opportunities from those transitions,” Kinsella said. “SAP is very strong in transactional back-office processes, but customers are increasingly looking to specialists like Manhattan for innovation in demand forecasting and supply chain planning.”
Responsible Ecommerce
Sustainability, Clark emphasised, continues to be a key focus. “When we think about sustainability, one of the areas that we think we can make a difference, a significant difference, for our customers, is with efficiency. I think that transportation is a clear area that lots of companies could improve, companies that are shipping trucks around that have empty space, dead weight, maybe shipping the wrong things to the wrong place inefficiently. So, the planning and the AI that go into this can create more efficiency around what’s in the truck, where the trucks are going and the optimal route. We’re constantly looking at how we think about sustainability and the way that we develop our products and the way that we help our customers execute.”
Sanjeev Siotia, Executive Vice President and CTO, echoed that sentiment. “The good thing is everything which we do actually makes operations more sustainable, because we’re trying to optimise, from how do you load the truck to how you can reduce the least number of miles, and every aspect of our product.”
Seroux added, “I think we have a lot of respect for all the European retailers who make a lot of efforts to reduce their carbon footprint to use fewer miles, less packages and so on so forth. We have raised our voice to say that we are outraged by the fact there is unfair competition from like the likes of Shein and Temu, bringing product probably made in the worst condition and transported in the worst sustainability condition and then it gets thrown away after a few uses. Europe should be united on this topic, and it’s a big one.”
Sharing Knowledge
Another ‘big one’ is the role AI is playing – is it a danger? Siotia says Manhattan think of it as more something which will assist and make you more productive, versus taking away your core knowledge.
Clark agreed. “It’s not magic. The information comes from somewhere. So, for example, we now give customers the ability to upload all of their training docs, their SOPs, into the platform, so that associates can ask questions about how to use the warehouse management system while they’re using it. Where do I induct this tote? I need to recharge my device. What do I do when I don’t find inventory in the location to go pick it that’s not coming from, some model in the cloud that’s coming from the fact that we allow the customers to essentially script all of their processes and effectively all the answers to those questions, and without getting into all the technical details. So it’s still their core knowledge that’s being shared. It’s just being shared far more easily and effectively.”
Seroux concluded that, instead of replacing workers, AI has the potential to create opportunities for learning and developing new skills.
“Within a large organization today, far more people are knowledgeable about software – how to configure it, optimise it, and solve issues – than there used to be. In the past, we thought you needed to have come from a particular engineering school and have five years’ experience configuring those systems. We’d have just two or three people with that expertise. Now, with large 3PLs running our solutions at scale across every continent, those teams have become more autonomous. This is because the systems themselves now include built-in tools that make it easier to learn, configure, and improve. It’s less about human knowledge disappearing and more about enabling greater potential to share knowledge.”
A multilingual professional experienced in Europe, Canada, and China, Herbert has developed invaluable networks in the automotive and energy industries. He has led high-profile projects involving ENBW, Mercedes-Benz Group, Siemens Group, and the Fraunhofer Institute.