Aren’t we all looking for ways to make our organisations more productive and creative? Both are necessary to perform at the top in these challenging times. While new innovations can help organisation take big strides forward, it is only by unifying technology that you truly increase the chances of attaining that smooth flow needed to operate commerce and supply chains effectively.

Wind force 6 on the high seas. High waves make the water splash across the bow and into your face. Today, you need all your attention to keep your sailboat on course. You see how the boat cleaves through the water and how the sails bulge in the wind. You experience how the boat reacts to every action and feel exactly when to tighten or loosen the lines. While you are completely immersed in sailing all sense of time disappears and you manage to get the most out of the boat. You become one with the boat and the elements. And you get an enormous kick out of the unprecedented speed.

Flow

This is what it feels like to be in flow, a mental state to which Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly has devoted most of his life to exploring. He describes flow as a state of supreme concentration and intrinsic motivation in which we are completely engrossed in the activity we are engaged in. The world around us seems to disappear. Time flies before us. When we are in a flow, every action or thought is a logical consequence of the previous action or thought. As we maximise all our knowledge and skills without it seeming to take energy, we achieve unprecedented productivity. Flow is the state top athletes are in when they achieve the legendary top performances that we talk about. It is also the state we experience at work when everything seems to happen by itself. Research shows that during this state we are five times more productive and creative than normal – unfortunately, getting into flow is not that easy. It doesn’t just happen to most of us. Yet we can say something about the conditions for achieving such a state. We only get into a flow if we have sufficient knowledge and experience of the activity and outcome we want to achieve. The activity must offer an above-average challenge, but at the same time, we must have enough confidence that we can bring it to a successful conclusion.

“With the unification of our solutions for order, warehouse and transportation management, processes are more aligned and synchronised than ever before.”

Complexity

Not only individuals can get into a state of flow, but organisations can too. Now that we live in a time of continuous change and challenge, one of the keys to long-term success is to achieve a state of flow as an organisation. In the business context this is a state where employees collectively apply their skills to achieve a mutually agreed goal despite constantly changing, challenging circumstances. “It should be clear that complexity in commerce and supply chain has increased tremendously in recent years. We are confident that with the Manhattan Active® Platform, we have the technology to enable retailers, wholesalers and brand owners alike to achieve their flow and successfully execute their commerce and supply chain processes to achieve a collective goal,” states Henri Seroux, Senior Vice President EMEA at Manhattan. Getting and staying in such a flow as an organisation requires leadership, investment, and communication, but also experience, alignment and continual innovation. Manhattan is a major contributor to the latter three components. Just consider all the experience the company has gained during projects around the world since its foundation in 1990. More than three decades of knowledge which today is incorporated into each and every new project it delivers, and also informs the ongoing innovation and development of the Manhattan Active Platform.

Unification

But the Manhattan Active Platform is more than a collection of business-to-business and business-to-consumer experiences. The unification of Manhattan Active Omni, Manhattan Active Warehouse Management and Manhattan Active Transportation Management create possibilities that were unthinkable until recently. “Previously, we had static, disconnected systems that were anything but real-time. With the unification of our solutions for order management, warehouse management and transportation management, processes are more aligned and synchronised than ever before.”

Take the example of a retailer that receives shop orders until four in the afternoon. Before its transportation management system can create a planning schedule, it must first check in with the warehouse management solution whether all ordered goods are in stock. Once the transportation planning can be finalised with this information, the WMS can start planning the order picking activities. The result after a few hours of work are two separate plans for the transport and warehouse activities. But what if a shop wants to adjust its order? Or if it turns out that goods that were not in stock have since arrived in meantime? The possibilities to adjust both schedules are limited and cumbersome, which in practice leads to sub-optimisations. Seroux adds: “The Manhattan Active Platform puts an end to this. Unification means that warehouse and transport operations are fully synchronised, allowing adjustments to be made without friction until the moment the truck actually drives away from the dock.”

“This all contributes to better flow in the warehouse and higher turnover rates, lower handling costs and shorter lead times”

Yard Management

New innovations strengthen the unification of systems, such as Manhattan Active Yard Management. Developed over the past year in cooperation with a handful of customers, this solution is the missing puzzle piece between Manhattan Active WM and TM. “With it, we increase the span of control from the warehouse to the outside yard and thereafter, the outside world. This opens up new possibilities. For example, when allocating docks to trailers with incoming goods.

When yard and warehouse management work together, it is possible to choose the dock that results in minimal driving distances during the inbound process. By matching the allocation of docks to the inbound and outbound locations in the warehouse, internal transportation distances decrease to a minimum and efficiency increases,” continues Seroux. 

Unification of yard with transportation management provides insight into the expected arrival times of trailers scheduled for loading and unloading. If a trailer is delayed by an hour, the reserved dock can be used for loading or unloading one or two other trailers. “This all contributes to better flow in the warehouse and higher turnover rates, lower handling costs and shorter lead times,” Seroux says. “And the great thing is, anyone who wants to use yard management only needs to turn it on in Manhattan Active WM or TM. Previously, this would have required a lengthy integration process, which could take months or years for companies to enjoy the benefits – that is not the case today.”

Generative AI

If there is one new innovation that helps organisations get and stay in a flow, it is perhaps generative AI. This is the form of artificial intelligence that is capable of generating new, texts, images, code or other media. Anyone who has experimented with GPT4 knows the power of this technology. “Generative AI will radically change the way organisations use our software. They will no longer have to scroll through screens themselves to find answers but will instead ask a simple question,” Seroux states.

As an example, take a team leader who, as he walks around the warehouse floor, gets the idea that work is piling up at the packing tables. He does not have to walk to his office first to conjure up the right dashboard on the screen. All he has to do is type or even ask the question to find out what the state of play is. The answer is clear: the packing department is indeed behind and needs four extra people for an hour and a half to catch up. “Then the team leader can ask where to get those four people from. Without having to click through dashboards and data fields, the system answers, providing four order pickers that are almost done with their work. The system can even go into the detail of listing the names of the four most suited order pickers based on experience and performance – all within just a few moments.”

“The system can even go into the detail of listing the names of the four most suited order pickers based on experience and performance all within just a few moments.”

Dialogue

Seroux admits that Manhattan had not considered the possibilities of generative AI when developing the Manhattan Active Platform, but its cloudnative architecture has allowed it to innovate into this space fast. “The platform was developed to enable the unification of our order, warehouse and transportation management solutions. But now it also offers the ability to interact with these additional new innovations and generate advice or provide the rationale for a decision at the moment you need it, without having to search for answers in the system manually.”

“Generative AI creates unification at a higher level - not only of software solutions, but also in terms of the application of the software solution by the end user. If we talk about flow as a state in which one action or thought follows logically from the previous one, in which everything seems to happen naturally without consuming energy, generative AI is undoubtedly a game changer,” Seroux ends.

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