My career at a market leader and a startup taught me that innovation is essential for success for both big and small companies . For a market leader like Manhattan Associates, Innovation allows it to stay ahead of competition.For a start up like Wave Crest, which is in a disruptive field and has a hockey stick growth, innovation allows it to adapt , stay relevant,retain talented workforce and challenge companies several times its size.
Manhattan Associates , traditionally a strong player in Warehouse management solutions, acquired many other solutions like transportation and demand forecasting solutions.However,these products largely remained independent, causing a steep rise in cost of ownership.Steep cost has prevented Manhattan Associates from cross selling to its loyal warehouse management solution customers.Together, Director of WMS(Warehouse management solutions - the team that i belong to ) and Chief architect of Manhattan by 2007, convinced management to embark on an expensive,but innovate mission to create SCOPE(First and only fully integrated supply chain platform) .Despite never seen recession in Mid 2007 and
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Our loyal WMS customers became our TMS and demand forecasting customers.We saw number of new clients that we signed up in 2009 is double what saw when all the solutions are independent.This experience taught me power of innovation .Today Manhattan Associates , which was stuck around 700M$ for 5 years(from 2004-2009), is trading at 3B$. While there could be several other factors, SCOPE is one of the major factor contributing to this growth