Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Manhattan Associates made a flurry of announcements at its ninth annual Momentum user conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week, including the introduction of a new supply chain execution suite, a new product naming scheme, and a commitment to roll out new releases of its applications across OS/400, Unix, and Windows operating systems at the same time. The Atlanta-based vendor also announced plans to acquire ReturnCentral, a Pittsburgh company that should boost Manhattan's presence in the market for reverse logistics software.

At the conference, attendees were given a glimpse of Manhattan's ongoing strategy to broaden its scope from the warehouse management software segment to the larger supply chain execution (SCE) market, and a sneak peak at Manhattan's new SCE suite. Manhattan billed the new SCE suite as a major release, with enhancements that include new labor management capabilities, a new execution dashboard, a new dynamic inquiry builder, slotting optimization enhancements designed to improve warehousing efficiency, and enhancements relating to the suite's compliance with global trade standards.

Features and functions aside, the biggest changes to Manhattan's software involve its new "Synchronized Release" initiative. While the new naming and release strategy won't be entirely fleshed out until the company's sales conference this July, Manhattan provided an outline of the new strategy and began to explain why it will benefit users.

From this point on, Manhattan will group its applications into three core areas, which it calls Warehouse Management System (WMS), Trading Partner Management (TPM), and Transportation Management System (TMS). In addition to being readily identifiable acronyms that describe the software's functionality and how companies use the applications, these will also be the formal names of Manhattan's applications going forward. As part of this initiative, Manhattan will be doing away with PkMS, the name of the company's original OS/400-based WMS, and the name that most people in the industry associate with Manhattan.

With Synchronized Release, Manhattan is committing to delivering updates for all of its supported operating systems--including OS/400, Solaris, AIX, and Windows--at the same time. Previously, Manhattan first would release enhancements to the OS/400-version of its PkMS suite, with support for Windows and the Unix platforms following several months later. That was not altogether unreasonable, considering that the vast majority of PkMS users ran the application on OS/400 servers. Manhattan reported, in June 2001, that approximately 90 percent of PkMS users ran the OS/400 platform, but that number has most likely slid since then, and the increased emphasis on rolling out support for Unix and Windows alongside OS/400 shows that Manhattan is more serious about competing on Unix and Windows. Manhattan says the new release initiative will benefit users by simplifying the upgrade path, enhancing the quality of its software (through a new testing schedule), and lowering the total cost of ownership associated with its products.

Manhattans' new WMS, TMS, and TPM applications are available now, according to a company spokesperson. WMS and TMS are supported on OS/400, Unix, and Windows, and TPM is only supported on Windows. The new versions of these applications are referred to as the "2003R1" releases, the spokesperson says. The next scheduled release, in February 2004, will be called 2004R1, and so forth.

Manhattan is increasing its research and development spending to support Synchronized Release. The software vendor will spend $30 million on R&D this year, according to AMR Research's Jonathan Sroka, and that compares favorably with the $20.8 million in R&D that the company spent last year, and $19.4 million and $16.1 million spent in 2001 and 2000 respectively. This R&D money should go even further, considering that Manhattan now has an established presence in India, Sroka says.

The acquistion of ReturnCentral provides Manhattan with software that streamlines the product returns process. It will be integrated with the new Trading Partner Management (TPM) application, and will provide users with a return policy rules engine, decision support for return to stock, liquidate and scrap inventory routing, and other capabilities.

Approximately 20 percent of all products sold are returned, according to ReturnCentral's founder and chief executive, David Hommrich.