Imagine a logistics network as a complex orchestra, where countless transportation elements, route selections, and resource allocations resemble musical notes on a score. A single misstep could lead to global chaos. With tightening delivery windows, growing freight volumes, and increasingly constrained capacity, how can one conduct this symphony with confidence to perform the beautiful music of efficient logistics? Manhattan Associates provides the answer: Manhattan Active Transportation Management (TM).
Manhattan Associates, the Atlanta-based supply chain software provider, recently launched its latest Transportation Management System (TMS) solution—Manhattan Active Transportation Management. The company emphasizes that this cloud-native product is designed to significantly reduce the time and effort required to optimize complex transportation networks. It's hailed as the industry's first self-configuring and self-optimizing system, delivering optimization speeds up to 80% faster. The solution offers a single, intuitive interface that enables transportation planners to visualize and optimize their entire network. Additionally, it features a new multi-modal optimization core that leverages advanced in-memory computing technology, providing shippers with the processing power needed to rapidly analyze and handle massive datasets.
Industry Challenges and Technological Innovation
To gain deeper insights into Manhattan Active Transportation Management, Rick Fernandez, Director of Corporate Communications at Manhattan Associates, granted an exclusive interview to discuss the solution's features and advantages.
"With delivery windows tightening, freight volumes growing, and capacity becoming increasingly constrained, developing and executing transportation plans has never been more challenging," Fernandez explained. "We redesigned and rebuilt what was already a market-leading transportation management solution because the industry urgently needed significant leaps in innovation, agility, and scale."
The development of this solution spanned several years. In 2017, Manhattan Associates launched the Manhattan Active platform—a suite of cloud-native solutions completely composed of microservices, architecturally designed to work together seamlessly, scale effortlessly, and never require upgrades. All subsequent product releases have been built upon this technological foundation.
Core Advantages for Shippers
Fernandez highlighted three primary benefits that Manhattan Active TM delivers to shipper clients:
Fastest: Manhattan Active TM features what the company claims is the industry's fastest multi-modal transportation optimization engine. Its advanced in-memory processing technology can calculate approximately 18 million feasibility considerations per second, reducing solution times by up to 80%. This represents significant time savings given the current complexity of transportation planning.
Smartest: The solution is also the first self-configuring and self-adjusting transportation network solver. It evaluates problems and automatically selects the optimal route generation technique without requiring planner intervention.
Easiest to Use: The system employs machine learning to automatically configure and adjust all factors necessary for creating optimal transportation plans.
Evolution, Not Revolution
When asked about new capabilities compared to previous versions, Fernandez emphasized that this wasn't about filling gaps but rather elevating performance:
"Manhattan's TMS solutions have consistently ranked among industry leaders. Before building Manhattan Active TM, we already had one of the most feature-rich and powerful transportation management solutions on the market. However, we recognized the rapid pace of industry change and the limitations of traditional solutions, prompting us to redesign our offering to meet today's requirements for flexibility, capability, and agility."
Practical Applications
Fernandez provided a concrete example of the solution in action:
Consider a large retailer needing to transport goods from multiple suppliers to stores nationwide. Traditional TMS would require planners to manually input parameters like supplier locations, store destinations, transportation modes, and freight costs—then painstakingly adjust these variables to find optimal solutions. This process is both time-consuming and error-prone.
With Manhattan Active TM, the retailer simply imports all relevant data. The system automatically analyzes this information, generates multiple transportation options considering factors like cost, transit time, and risk, then selects the optimal plan based on predefined preferences—all within minutes. The solution also dynamically adjusts plans in response to real-world conditions like traffic congestion or supplier delays, ensuring continuous optimization.
This capability translates to improved transportation efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced customer satisfaction—critical competitive advantages in today's demanding logistics environment.
Conclusion
Manhattan Active Transportation Management represents more than just a TMS upgrade—it's a fundamental reimagining of logistics efficiency. Built on cloud-native architecture and powered by self-configuring, self-optimizing technology with formidable computational capabilities, it offers businesses unprecedented transportation management capabilities. As supply chain complexities continue to escalate, solutions like Manhattan Active TM will become indispensable tools for organizations seeking to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and strengthen their competitive position.