We returned from three conferences in two weeks with an enthused perspective about the future of supply chain technology.
Industry Credibility with Gartner
The first week started with the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium and Xpo. This is an enterprise heavy event with executives who are Gartner customers looking to connect with analysts to learn more about trends and get specific questions answered.
The Gartner Market Guide for Multicarrier Parcel Shipping Management will come out this year, and we are excited to share the details with you in the future. The role of Gartner in the ecosystem is to be a trusted advisor on the credibility of technology solutions, which could be felt as the main vibe of the conference. It is the most "serious" of events of the year, and for good reason: Executives need to make critical decisions on which technologies to trust for the heartbeat of their operations, and this is the ecosystem to qualify options.
CEO Jason Murray shared a few observations on LinkedIn, which you can view here:
In short, AI had a lot of buzz but the real world applicability was still emerging. Instead, it was a diverse set of industries seeking ideas to attack cost structures and modernization needs. We talked to as many bio science companies as retailers, for example.
Almost every discussion started with executives trying to square "where" Shipium fit in their existing stack of technology systems. The most helpful conversation we could offer people was to give examples of how we improved the operations and outcomes of their WMS, OMS, TMS, or ERP in partnership with their existing vendor.
Systems of Record Partners
Which is a good lead into our next set of events, the Blue Yonder ICON and Manhattan Momentum customer conferences, respectively. Both held the same week, we sent team members to each.
Blue Yonder ICON started first, and CMO Kris Gösser was on stage to talk about the partnership. The discussion highlighted how Shipium is the end-to-end shipping platform partner that helps Blue Yonder Commerce deliver more accurate delivery promises via its Commits product, while improving downstream shipping outcomes integrating into Blue Yonder WM. A recording will be available next week.
The majority of the conference provided conversations for Blue Yonder customers to discover and understand how we fit with their existing Blue Yonder solutions. The overwhelming focus was on amplifying the value of those systems and solving emergent problems that other partners are failing to address.
Meanwhile, Manhattan Momentum offered a chance to connect with customers of their platform. Jason spoke with Duluth Trading Company, a happy joint customer, about the positive 2023 peak season Duluth saw leveraging Manhattan Active WM with Shipium.
That session made the keynote presentation by Manhattan CEO Eddie Capel, where Shipium was the only partner mentioned. It shows the value Manhattan puts on Shipium as the unified shipping partner to interoperate the full suite of the Manhattan platform.
How Shipium Connects Partners
As unified supply chains become the biggest priority of enterprise operators, companies are looking for solutions to help bridge key decisions across existing processes, systems, and departments.
Shipping is no different than some of the other urgent priorities, like inventory and customer experience. In fact, it's possibly the most important category because of it's outsized impact on the bottom line and relationship to hot topics like the afore mentioned.
A modern shipping management system that coordinates shipping operations across the supply chain will integrate into all of the systems of record a company might be using, and ensure upstream decisions related to shipping are aligned for the best downstream outcomes—like faster, cheaper, and more accurate deliveries.
A platform like Shipium is an end-to-end optimization partner that acts like part calculator and part air-traffic-controller to ensure that decisions all the way up in the ERP, like inventory allocation, are optimized for downstream costs, like delivery.
Example use cases across each of the key partner systems already in place:
- ERP — Take into consideration probable downstream cost and speed calculations for certain types of SKUs across a multi-node network to help inform inventory placement. Shipium's goal is to not takeaway demand planning and allocation from other systems, but provide transportation speed and cost projects to make them better at what they do.
- Website — The website or the OMS will provide a customer EDD (estimated delivery date). EDDs aren't as accurate as they need to be without understanding probable transportation speed and cost values. We help provide those so the website can combine it with inventory position awareness, often owned by the ERP or OMS, and combined the two for the most accurate EDDs in the industry.
- OMS — Order routing should be owned by the OMS, which if often is. But those decisions are usually business rules based on inventory. By pulling in probable transportation speed and cost values across all possible fulfillment origins, and combine those values with other considerations that the OMS owns like markdowns or labor constraints or otherwise, order routing will become more cost efficient and improve customer experience.
- WMS — At the moment of pick and pack, whether pre-manifest or post-manifest, use Shipium to optimize the shipping decisions.
- TMS — Use Shipium to optimize parcel costs with LTL management, or add shipping results for visibility into the TMS as the source of truth.
The Future
It's clear that in 2024 and beyond, the ability for technology solutions to integrate and amplify the outcomes of each other is the most essential ingredient of success for the retail industry.
The ecosystem must work together, including consultants and systems integrators, to solve the modern challenges of enterprises. Our engagement at these events proved Shipium is doing its part to address the unique modern shipping challenges of enterprises who use industry leading solutions elsewhere, like Blue Yonder and Manhattan in this example. We are excited to continue to scale that trust and respect!