Manhattan Associates and Blue Yonder both had large booths at the National Retail Federation expo in New York. (Photo: FreightWaves)
NEW YORK – The first conference each year for supply chain software suppliers to show off their capabilities is the giant National Retail Federation meeting here, and 2025 was no different. Among the presentations: One key supplier touted the fruits of a two-year project, and another discussed how its generative AI tool has been faring in its first months.
Blue Yonder rolled out its latest update to a supply chain management platform that is used significantly in the retail sector. The company had a hard-to-miss booth at the Javits Center in New York for demonstrating the capabilities it had announced to the world three days before the exhibition floors at NRF opened to the public. The project took two years.
And just down from Blue Yonder was the booth for Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH). Its software, which has a significant base of transportation customers but keys on the warehouse sector, rolled out a generative AI capability at the company’s Momentum conference in San Antonio last spring. By January, there was enough of a usage experience to give at least a preliminary accounting of how people are leveraging that capability.
TMS supplier Magnus Technologies wasn’t at NRF. But just about the same time that the meeting was getting ready to launch, a key executive had a few things he wanted to say about the state of technology for transportation management systems, which are often integrated with the types of supply chain software systems provided by companies like Manhattan Associates and Blue Yonder.
Here’s what the three companies had to say.
Manhattan Associates
At Momentum, a May meeting of the company’s users and partners, Manhattan Associates showcased the generative AI capabilities built into Manhattan Active, its supply chain management platform.
At NRF, Adam Kline, senior director of product management with particular focus on warehouse customers, said about half of Manhattan Associates’ customers are using the generative AI capabilities in Active. “We’ve got a set of customers that are hitting it every day, and we have other customers that never touch it, because it’s new and it’s different.” But overall, Kline said, “we’re seeing adoption happening faster and faster. And the model keeps getting better and better.”
Before the tool was released, Kline said, Manhattan Associates “really put it through its paces.”
In building the tool, he said, product managers were tasked with providing a list of questions to see whether it gave accurate answers. “We’d score the results, because we knew what the answer was supposed to be,” he said. If the answer wasn’t correct or lacked at least satisfactory accuracy, “we’d say, all right, try again. We’d put in the same questions, score it. OK, it’s a little better but not good enough.”
That process went on for months, according to Kline, before the GenAI tool was released, “because the first impression is so important.”
He cautioned about generative AI’s capabilities: “It’s not a magic button that you plug in, and like, poof, everything happens,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s pretty cool technology behind the models.”
Adam Kline of Manhattan Associates at NRF
All of the information that feeds into Active is internal; Kline said there is no accessing of data or other information from sites that could be found on the web.
Of Manhattan Associates’ verticals, Kline said, the warehouse management sector is the largest use of the generative AI tool in Active.
Illustrating how the tool can be used as an assistant to an employee rather than a job destroyer, Kline said a customer could use the generative AI capabilities in Active as a “starting point” for building new code. The tool won’t do the whole job, he said. “But in no time you can say, ‘Write me a function that will validate an expiration date, plus this other thing, plus shelf, left, whatever is needed,’” he said. “Now all of a sudden, implementation times are shrinking and the cost of ownership is shrinking.”
Blue Yonder
Blue Yonder revealed an upgraded platform that CEO Duncan Angove said in a prepared statement “represents the culmination of two years of effort and the integration of 8,000 workstreams spanning supply, demand and business planning, synchronized execution, and AI-centric data modeling.”
A key strength of the product that Lesley Simmonds, vice president of industry strategy for retail softlines and hardlines, referred to several times in an interview at NRF with FreightWaves: end-to-end.
Simmonds was asked how a supply chain software offering can differentiate itself in a crowded market, when so much of the functionality is overlapping. “So you might have a competitor out in the market that says they have this particular function,” Simmonds said. “But do they have the underlying network that underpins the end-to-end supply chain?”
A key capability being touted by Blue Yonder in its rollout is connectivity in the system to the software user’s vendors. And that comes, Simmonds said, from Blue Yonder’s acquisition last year of One Network. In the announcement touting the $839 million acquisition, Blue Yonder said it gave its customers “the ability to collaborate and share data – from inventory levels to raw and finished goods materials movement – in real time across all trading partners up and down the supply chain.”
And that’s what end to end signifies for Blue Yonder. “We’re bringing together the vendors and the suppliers on a common platform, and what that enables is that end-to-end visibility of where your inventory is throughout the entire process or life cycle,” Simmonds said.
All supply chain platforms have inventory systems, Simmonds added. But the value proposition that Blue Yonder is marketing with its new rollout is that “if you have visibility into the network and visibility into your vendors, you can proactively move when there are disruptions,” she said.
Visibility isn’t new. But the interaction with vendors that Blue Yonder says comes with the acquisition of One Network is what the company sees as a competitive advantage.
“What we’re creating is a full ecosystem of vendor suppliers that you can actually onboard onto that specific platform, where you can actually collaborate with them as a retailer and also manage the processes behind it, so you can manage the costing behind it,” Simmonds said. “You can see into the service levels that they’re providing to your business, so it gives you opportunity and insights.”
Just as Manhattan Associates’ Kline said generative AI in Active draws strictly from internally provided datasets, Simmonds said the datasets provided by the wider Blue Yonder network provide that same type of base.
The data provided by the broader network means that “information can be gathered together. They can come out in a report to the business that says, ‘OK, on the East Coast, because we’ve gone through this cold weather, we are selling out of cashmere scarves.’”
It’s the sort of actionable insight that has taken AI in one year to a level where real solutions are possible, Simmonds said. She added that a year ago, AI in supply chain software was like sex in high school: “Everybody’s talking about it but nobody’s really doing it.”
Magnus Technologies
Magnus Technologies, a TMS supplier, wasn’t at NRF. But Jay Delaney, director of product management at Magnus, reached out to FreightWaves to discuss some themes that overlapped with Manhattan Associates’ and Blue Yonder’s comments at NRF.
Companies like Manhattan Associates have been pushing customers to a SaaS-based system operating in the cloud for several years. Both Simmonds and Kline were asked about it, and each said the pace of that transition at the respective companies had accelerated.
Magnus has been involved in the same push. What bugged Delaney was a sign he saw at a competitor’s booth last year declaring that “TMS is dead.”
It’s not, Delaney said in an interview with FreightWaves. It’s just migrated and the rate of adoption into the cloud is picking up.
“There is a lot of pent-up frustration in the market today,” Delaney said. “Customers have felt alienated that their voice is not being heard, because they’re not getting the rate and pace of change or enhancements or features that they would like to see for their dollar.”
The consistent pace of upgrades possible from subscribing to a TMS via cloud computing rather than an on-premises software installation is a solution for that, Delaney said. Magnus is putting out updates through its SaaS product every four to six weeks, he added. The traditional on-premises model might have an update once a year.
Rather than dying, Delaney said, TMS is undergoing an “evolution,” not a revolution, through the cloud. And a key advantage in a cloud-based TMS is the wider use of APIs, which allow computer systems to talk to each other and share data.
“In the client server world,” Delaney said, “APIs were an afterthought. They still struggle today to define and integrate their technology with other third parties.”
But a TMS as a SaaS, he said, is built with an “API-centric mindset,” Delaney added.
