Shipping is one of the most significant operating expenses for ecommerce businesses, and many find it challenging to control these costs while improving their overall shipping operations to meet increasingly aggressive consumer demands for delivery speed.
Manhattan Active® Warehouse Management, along with prior Manhattan WMS versions still positively serving customers today, helps ensure your warehouse fulfillment operates efficiently within your broader supply chain ecosystem. But is your system properly optimized to address modern ecommerce delivery challenges?
Let's explore seven ways to optimize Manhattan WMS for delivery efficiency, reducing costs and boosting customer experience.
Offering cost-effective shipping options has become a standard expectation. But it isn’t realistic if you rely on only one or two carriers alone. Applying a multi-carrier strategy provides the flexibility and optimization needed to live up to delivery promises.
Diversifying your carrier mix offers:
Combining the Shipium platform with Manhattan WMS helps streamline the carrier management process. Our extensive pre-integrated carrier network reduces rollout times, allowing you to add new carriers within a day. For carriers not currently part of the Shipium network, we can integrate them into your mix in eight weeks.
Integrating regional carriers into your strategy can provide a shortcut to savings and increased performance. They are already optimized for their specific geographies and benefit from lower overhead than their national counterparts, making them particularly cost-effective.
With regional carriers in your mix, you can leverage:
The ability to quickly adapt your shipping strategy can make or break your customer experience. Legacy systems often require weeks or months to implement changes, leaving you unable to respond to sudden market shifts or business needs.
Focus on implementing flexible technology that allows for:
Look for platforms that take an API-first approach. These developer-friendly tools can simplify integration with existing systems, add flexibility, and reduce implementation timelines.
Estimated delivery dates (EDD) help increase cart conversions for ecommerce brands. But static delivery guarantees to boost sales can result in missed delivery dates, leading to unhappy customers and increased costs as you attempt to meet unrealistic promises by using premium shipping services.
To make delivery promises that you can keep, you need to implement EDDs powered by transit data from your systems (ecommerce platform, OMS, WMS and TMS).
With accurate, data-driven delivery promises, you:
Shipium’s dynamic time-in-transit models, powered by machine learning and an expert data science team, help augment your existing Manhattan systems to help solve for the variable and volatile parts of transportation. You can rely on your industry-leading inventory and order management solutions with Manhattan to know accurate availability, then pair it with our transit calculations to get the most accurate EDDs in the industry.
Ensuring effective cartonization, which determines optimal packaging configuration, can improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction. Using robust cartonization capabilities built into Manhattan WMS, you can optimize your packaging process, leading to the following:
Manhattan provides excellent cartonization solutions within its WMS. Sometimes, customers want to pull that upstream into other areas of their operations. In that case, a shipping partner like Shipium can help through microservices related to cartonization.
Discover how to optimize cartonization and lower shipping costs with Shipium’s packaging planner API.
Unified operations across systems and fulfillment points are key to optimizing your ecommerce delivery. By integrating Manhattan's warehouse and order management solutions with a platform like Shipium, you can keep your existing systems connected, driving efficiency and uncovering opportunities.
Benefits of unifying your operations include:
You need to monitor your performance and optimize your processes to maintain high on-time delivery accuracy at the lowest per-package pricing. Combining the insight provided by the native monitoring in your Manhattan warehouse management system with the advanced capabilities of tools like Shipium Simulation allows you to make informed decisions about your shipping strategies.
The Simulation offering allows you to tweak different customizations to get an understanding of how changes can impact your business so you can:
How impactful can simulation be for your organization? In a case study, a Fortune 500 retailer used the tool to understand how Shipium's dynamic time-in-transit model would impact their existing fulfillment network and carrier mix. The results projected a reduced cost per package, with around $29.6 million in potential savings across 80M annual domestic parcel shipments.
As a trusted MVP partner of Manhattan Associates, Shipium helps organizations enhance their shipping operations. The combined Shipium/Manhattan solution leverages our carrier network and end-to-end coordination, from website delivery promises to warehouse execution. In fact, within the first year of using Shipium, Manhattan customers can reduce annual parcel spend by 12% on average.
Book a demo today and discover how to optimize your ecommerce delivery by integrating your Manhattan WMS with Shipium’s enterprise shipping platform.