Manhattan Associates, a leader in supply chain software, offers a suite of Supply Chain Management (SCM) products, including order management, store inventory & fulfillment, Point of Sale (POS), warehouse management, transportation management, and more to manage an enterprise’s supply chain ecosystem.
Manhattan Associates commands industry and analyst respect through their ground-breaking approach to addressing business needs, modular features, technologies, and customer support. Their cloud offering is slightly unique from other supply chain software vendors’ cloud offering models in terms of technology approach using dynamically scalable containerized micro-services, customizable & end-customer deployable extensions, replicated database-based business intelligence (BI) etc.
Cloud Transformation Hurdles
The biggest challenge in transforming an on-prem supply chain solution to a cloud SaaS for large enterprises is adopting their custom business processes to the vendor’s base functionality. Sometimes it may appear that the organizations will be better off if they give up their business customizations and run their business with the base product functionalities
But in the current competitive business landscape, while the custom functionalities, processes, and speed are the major business differentiator, the businesses must keep them in place, whether developed in-house or already customized code on any SCM product.
Ecosystem Expansion
Manhattan circumvents cloud constraints through a two-pronged approach.
First, they offer their Active version of SCM Products as a private tenant model on the Google Cloud. Enterprises can implement a data stream to send & receive production data to a set of supported target systems. Manhattan also optionally provisions replicated database, and customers can leverage this data for all their asynchronized data needs.
Second, Manhattan has enabled a ProActive platform to overcome the customization hurdles. It is Manhattan native extension platform designed to imbibe customer business-specific enhancements without altering Manhattan Active base products.
What is Manhattan ProActive?
Manhattan ProActive is a platform that comes with its cloud-native product to support customization and extension at various levels. This provides the ability to customize both browser-based and hand-held UI and screen flow, enrich or control the data mid-flow, call external system APIs or call in the Published Manhattan API from other systems both in a synchronized and asynchronized manner.
Manhattan ProActive Know-Hows
Manhattan ProActive is a highly technical platform and is targeted at technical IT admins and system integrators supporting Manhattan applications on the customer front.
- Scope
- Business cases that need outputs from Manhattan functions but are not available as part of the standard integration messages are considered in scope
- Business cases that need additional validations that are outside the Manhattan base modules are considered in scope
- Business cases that need additional inputs that would customize Manhattan base behavior are considered in scope
- Expertise
- While it is not mandatory, users with containers, microservices, postman, API, JSON, scheduler, messages queues, Google PubSub, and database knowledge shall configure ProActive much more efficiently.
- Users should understand the Manhattan modules and functions related to the APIs before configuring and extending this feature
- Users should verify the configuration behavior for both standard and the new extension points
- Manhattan R&D may need to be involved in certain configurations, such as call-back functions
- Ongoing Maintenance
- Users should verify that extension packs used for extensions are supported and intact before every release and include customized use cases as part of the release automation and test scripts
Sample Ecosystem
Manhattan ProActive Implementation
ProActive is available as part of the Active license, expert guidance is mandatory for successful implementation. However, versatile knowledge in Manhattan supply chain modules, Google CloudOps, and emerging development technologies are crucial to implementation success.
Appreciation of IT & Business Ecosystem
In-depth study and knowledge of customers’ IT Ecosystem and appreciation for the “Use Cases” that are being configured in the ProActive layer are mandatory
Change Assessment
Before undertaking the change, one should explore the problem statement, place of implementation, and solution approach from the end-to-end supply chain viewpoint.
The design approach, including the ProActive side of changes, configurations, and external systems updates, need to be evaluated and documented before implementation. In addition, parallel rollouts of changes in other systems need to be coordinated and tested before production rollout.
Another important aspect is how the whole customization work will be carried out for different business locations, organizational hierarchy, profiles, environments etc., along with how the changes get moved from one environment to another.
If the vendor company has previously developed enhancements before go-live (call it, existing enhancements) using ProActive architecture, then a thorough regression assessment is mandatory
Release Management
As Manhattan started this cloud-based version-less journey, they provided patches every six weeks and functionality improvements every quarter.
To manage the customized and enhanced code, the frequency of these releases, and the amount of custom work done, automated release testing is a smart thing to do.
If the scope of change is limited to Manhattan, then Manhattan Services can handle this. Suppose the change propagates and impacts non-MA systems, including ERP, and 3rd party systems, then it is ideal to engage the Customers’ IT department or a third-party system integrator team that is experienced in this area and has SCM domain experience to foresee the changes.
