Manhattan Associates Inc has unveiled Sightline, a new capability within ActivePlanning, to reveal the reasoning behind AI-driven forecasts, recommendations, and inventory decisions in plain business language.
Sightline brings the “why” behind projected outcomes directly into the application, from a single order line to an entire network.
It gives planners forensic-level understanding of the factors shaping forecasts, orders, and inventory positions, including forecast inputs, safety stock decisions, vendor minimums, lead times, promotional effects, fulfillment shifts, and network movements.
For decades, planners have had to leave the system and work in tools like Microsoft Excel to understand the logic behind planning decisions.
Sightline changes that by delivering real-time, in-application analysis that turns hours of off-system investigation into answers in seconds.
Planners can quickly understand why a forecast changed, why a projection ran high or low, or what factors drove a recommendation.
Advanced AI forecasting can often feel like a black box that requires a data scientist to do the analysis. Forecasts get adjusted by AI, replenishment recommendations come from AI, and allocation decisions get nudged by AI.
Practitioners often have difficulty understanding exactly why it’s doing what it’s doing. But with Sightline they get real-time, in-application analysis, turning hours of investigation into answers in seconds.
Sightline also introduces dynamic, configurable views built around how planners actually work, whether by role, promotion, activity, or a combination of those perspectives.
These views across forecasts, order projections, and planned inventory levels are enabled through a new configurable workspace for planners, reducing time spent answering routine “why” questions and eliminating the need for third-party business intelligence tools or Excel.
“At Manhattan, we are committed to continuous innovation and simplification, which helps our customers work smarter and move faster,” said Brian Kinsella, senior vice president and chief product officer at Manhattan.
“With Sightline, we’re giving planning teams a powerful new way to understand the drivers behind every outcome, accelerate decision-making, and drive higher productivity across the supply chain.” he said.
Sightline establishes a new mandate for planning software by embedding explainability directly into the planning system, so users can investigate outcomes where decisions are made.
