A significant product release from Manhattan Associates, a top provider of omnichannel and supply chain management software solutions, is expected to disrupt the supply chain planning industry. During Momentum, the company's annual user conference, the news was made on May 15.

Manhattan Active Supply Chain Planning was released, according to Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH). This places their SCP and other solutions on the same microservices platform. This makes it possible for supply chain planning and execution systems to collaborate in both directions, creating "the industry's first unified business planning platform."

Is this simply promotional hyperbole? Explaining why this is a big step forward for the industry will take some time.

Businesses are aware of the difficulty in aligning their supply chain strategies with practical implementation. It's called the "shop floor to top floor disconnect" by the manufacturers. This illustrates the challenge faced by manufacturers in aligning the strategies decided upon at an integrated business planning executive meeting with the production capabilities of the shop floor within the short-term planning horizon.

Nevertheless, there is another reason for the disconnect: the supply plan's modeling of manufacturing restrictions is not detailed enough, and it is also not detailed enough when it comes to comprehending warehousing and transportation constraints.

For a vast, complex supply chain, a supply planning solution might only be able to accomplish rough-cut capacity planning. A supply planning system might, for instance, build a model indicating that a facility can manufacture 20,000 units of a given product in a given week. The plant cannot create that many goods nearly as rapidly as planned when the plan is dropped to the floor. The personnel availability, machine throughput by product, product wheel, and other practical limitations were not properly taken into account in the plan.

The transportation and warehouse sectors are susceptible to the same disconnect. For instance, there could not be enough dock doors, staff, or storage space to complete the day's tasks if a promotion plan has not been appropriately designed for the warehouse. On the other hand, a Manhattan Active SCP plan starts with a bottom-up knowledge of the warehouse's capabilities. The resulting plan would be "smoothed" in the event of a significant promotion by starting the plan's execution days sooner.

In order to create a bottom-up plan, data must be intelligently transformed. The capacity of the ERP to employ a bill of materials to translate a demand plan, which forecasts in units, and then convert those units into tons of raw materials that required to be sourced, was the first significant differentiation in the ERP market decades ago. The procurement plan is made practical through the BOM transformation.

Manhattan is undergoing an equally revolutionary makeover when it comes to transportation. Employees choose cases and assemble pallets in a warehouse. Pallet building logic is aware of the cartons' weights and dimensions. Based on this, the solution recognizes that product A cannot be used to construct a six-layer set of cartons on a pallet. Product A is very large. There have to be five layers. In a similar manner, product C needs to be placed on the bottom layers of an alternative pallet. Product B will crush those cartons if it is placed at the bottom.

After the pallet layout is finished, you can construct a more superior truckload. Pallet-building logic and the reasoning of how many pallets it takes to fill a truck are comparable. The dimensions and weight of the pallets are taken into consideration when building the trailer, along with factors like crushability and whether the pallets will weigh out or cube out the trailer. Companies prefer to cube out; they don't like to ship air. It is also possible to smooth a transportation plan that was created with a thorough grasp of the limitations associated with trailer manufacturing.

Put simply, considerably more practical and executable plans are produced because to the bidirectional messaging between Manhattan's SCE and SCP solutions. It is important to note that there isn't a production scheduling or planning application in Manhattan. Stores and distributors will find greater use for this new product.

Manhattan seems to have a lasting competitive advantage here. It might take years for rivals to catch up. It's time for Manhattan to develop a production scheduling program that will be housed on the platform and offer manufacturers, not only merchants and wholesalers, a cutting-edge solution.