Rainforest Distribution has selected Manhattan Associates’ cloud-native platform to unify its planning activities, improve demand forecasting, and increase supply chain resilience amid rising complexity and volatility in the food and beverage sector.
Manhattan Associates Inc. said Rainforest Distribution Corp., a full-service food and beverage wholesaler, has chosen Manhattan Active® Supply Chain Planning to consolidate its planning activities and upgrade demand ...
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forecasting, replenishment and end-to-end planning on a single cloud-native platform.
According to a company announcement, Rainforest moved away from multiple legacy tools to the Manhattan Active platform to gain continuous visibility across its network and to better balance service levels, cost and capacity while reacting more quickly to shifts in customer demand. The statement added the solution is designed to align planning with execution across distribution and transportation operations through a microservices-based architecture.
“As our business continues to scale, the complexity of our supply chain has increased exponentially,” said Alexander Ridings, CEO, Rainforest Distribution. “We needed a modern planning solution that could keep pace with that growth, give our teams a single, trusted view of demand and inventory, and help us serve customers with greater reliability. Manhattan Active Supply Chain Planning gives us the unified, intelligent platform we were looking for to align our planners, our operations, and our strategic growth ambitions.”
Manhattan Associates framed the deal as part of a broader push to eliminate operational silos by providing bi-directional collaboration between planning and execution. The company says its SCP product enables planners to evaluate real-time operational factors , including labour, orders and capacity , and adjust strategies accordingly. “Rainforest Distribution operates in an environment where agility, accuracy, and responsiveness are critical,” said Stewart Gantt, executive vice president of Global Services, Manhattan Associates. “We are excited to partner with them on this transformation to help them unlock new levels of efficiency and build a more resilient, data-driven supply chain.”
Industry materials from Manhattan portray Active SCP as a pioneering unified planning platform that natively links planning with execution to reduce conflicting strategies across inventory, labour, transport and warehouse operations. According to the vendor, this unification supports enterprise-wide optimisation against objectives such as lowering total landed cost or accelerating speed to market.
Manhattan’s recent customer wins and industry recognition bolster its positioning. The firm highlights that Natura, the Latin American cosmetics group, has implemented Manhattan Active Warehouse Management and Transportation Management to join warehousing and transport planning on a single platform, enabling faster responses to disruptions through integrated visibility. Retailers have also adopted Manhattan’s Active modules more widely; Ocean State Job Lot, a discount retailer, recently moved to Manhattan Active Transportation Management as part of a broader effort to modernise logistics planning. Manhattan Active Supply Chain was also named Best Distribution Innovation in the 2022 Vendors in Partnership Awards, an accolade the company cites when underscoring the platform’s productivity and competitive benefits.
Analysts and supply‑chain practitioners note that food and beverage distribution presents particular challenges , short shelf lives, fluctuating demand and tight service expectations , that benefit from closer alignment between forecasting and operational execution. Industry data shows that unified, cloud-native planning systems can shorten the feedback loop between what happens on the warehouse floor and what planners see, improving replenishment timing and reducing stockouts or overstocks.
Rainforest’s adoption highlights an ongoing trend among distributors and retailers toward integrated planning suites as organisations scale and face more volatile demand. The company’s deployment will be watched for evidence that a single platform can materially improve forecast accuracy and responsiveness in the fast-moving food and beverage sector, where execution-driven feedback and AI-enhanced forecasting are increasingly viewed as differentiators.
Source: Noah Wire Services
