OK, it has taken me longer than I planned to come back with a fuller writeup.
I’ve covered the “MACH” message in a seperate post already.
Key themes and gaps
- a small trade show floor split across multiple rooms; with a heavy bias of parcel carrier management, transportation management vendors, the usual hardware suppliers (Zebra, Exotech who supply warehouse ASRS systems), and a few SIs including Accenture and IBM
- No representation at off of the Allocation product (Omnitalk blog/vlog had a interview session with the product owner a few months back)
- fairly even balance of sessions between Omni (OMS,CRM,POS), WMOS & Active WMS, and Scale WMS
- keynote/“entertainment” speaker across day 1 & 2 days was Ken Hughes, Consumer Behaviorist “The King of CX”, presenting a selection of his usual speeches such as “blue dot consumer” and also on brand engagement, using as a case study what Taylor Swift does to engage her fans and create loyalty to what businesses should be considering.
Day 0.5 – User Group Day (Manhattan Active Omni Customer order management system user group for me; other UGs covered WMS x 2, TMS)
- Ongoing improvement in OMS Digital self service improvements, with some retailers uptaking Pay by link to finalise contact centre selling experiences and also handle failed payments/refunds
- confirmation that you can build your own digital self service experiences using published APIs called from your web platform.
- Presentations from L’Occitane, Louboutin, Suitsupply, and Manhattan OMS product management team.
- A growing base of customers who are also implementing commercetools
- One customer (B2B: Kramp) who has implemented prior (on prem) version of Manhattan OMS with Mirakl to create a B2B marketplace (Maykers) for supply to European farmers; Kramp also presented at the recent Mirakl conference in London; Kramp is exploring the upgrade from on-prem to SaaS (Active Omni)
- One retailer on site is considering moving from Fluent Commerce OMS to Manhattan Active Omni OMS, as well as integration to commercetools.
- Some discussions in the user group about whether Manhattan should offer a more out of the box experience for order history as a whole (headless and responsive web), and optimising the customer entry into digital self service experiences (order history, links on emails/notifications etc.)
Day 1 & 2.
- Keynote: Usual Keynote from Eddie Capel/Brian Kinsella (who were also available for networking at the “appreciation party” evening of Day 1). Pitching for the benefits of having Manhattan cover more of the enterprise because their superior and holistic internal integrations (on the “Active” platform), moving beyond the challenges of needing to build “bridges” between more siloed/Line of Business, best of breed solutions in the enterprise.
It’s worth noting that MAC elements of “MACH” is only slowly gaining acceptance beyond the digital space, via OMS POS, CRM into ERP, Supply chain, which would make the creation of more seamless solutions for best of breed possible (moving away from “bridges” that need to align to poor endpoint capability integrating to monolithic solutions which include functionality that the enterprise does not need but is sometimes forced to use). - OTB (Diesel) updating on their multi-brand rollout of Manhattan OMS
- JD sports on their multi-DC rollout of cloud WMS (Justin Cox, ex of Arcadia, JLP, is leading that initiative and was presenting)
- L’Oreal updating on their huge multi-country, multiwarehouse Manhattan cloud WMS (and TMS?) rollout–covering 40 (FORTY! ) warehouses with an evolving repeatable template
- Kering presenting case study on their headless implementation of Manhattan clientelling store application
- Kramp (european B2B agri supply) discussed their forthcoming upgrade from on-prem Manhattan DOM to cloud OMS–they have also integrated Mirakl (“Maykers” marketplace)
Other notes
On the payments front, Manhattan maintains pre-built connectors to
- CyberSource (including Decision Manager, DM designed and tested in OMS Foundation)
- Adyen (new partnership heavily promoted at the conference)
- WorldPay, but to the versions of Worldpay offered in the US only, not the solution we have signed up for in the UK/Ireland (WorldPay has grown by acquisition and not rationalised their solution offering). No ETA/roadmap for connector for UK/EU Worldpay from either Manhattan or Worldpay.
I noticed on the final day that a rep from Gartner was in the audience.
Fun stuff
Picture of myself with the marketing team–the printed sweatshirts we are all wearing happened to be an existing New Look product that was on sale, one of life’s amusing synchronicities than anything planned–if it was planned it would of course refer to Manhattan Beach, CA, not NYC ). Of course I tipped off the conference team when I spotted them in the office
These Manhattan sweats from #NewLook were the perfect look for our white party