Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand leverages networked community and business-to-business connectivity expertise to enable lower total cost of ownership and accelerate return on investment
At the Extended Supply Chain Conference, Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. subsidiary, announced the availability of Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand, a new Software as a Service that provides partner connectivity, process integration and real-time visibility throughout a companys extended supply chain. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand instantly displays and summarises actionable supply chain information from all electronic trading partners and communities through a secure, reliable hosted infrastructure.
By combining business-to-business integration expertise with its global supply chain community, Sterling Commerce is delivering an innovative solution that enables manufacturers, retailers, and distribution companies to maximise the number of supply chain partners with whom they do business. By extending the partner community, Sterling Commerce transforms extended supply chain data into real-time actionable data, resulting in improved operational efficiencies, lower inventories and inventory carrying costs, and greater responsiveness to supply chain disruptions.
Achieving real-time, extended supply chain visibility has been a challenge. A September 2007 Aberdeen report states: Many companies still do not have timely visibility into the critical processes involved in global supply chain management, despite the heightened attention to this area in recent years. This often prevents companies from accessing information quickly enough to be able to use it for decision making1.
Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand addresses the visibility challenge by leveraging an existing community and minimising the effort to collaborate with that community. With more than 19,000 Sterling Collaboration Network (SCN) customers and more than 90 global network interconnects, Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand provides customers with immediate access to more than 270,000 unique trading entities around the globe. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand enables customers to implement flexible business processes and manage the flow of information regarding its mission-critical business activities across organisational and geo-political boundaries.
Sterling Commerce understands the power of community, and has spent more than 30 years harnessing that power to deliver innovative solutions. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand leverages the companys rich heritage in community management with its business process applications to enable companies to reach a new level in how they collaborate with their supply chain ecosystem, said Josh Hardy, global product line manager, Sterling Collaboration Network, for Sterling Commerce. Through the industrys most robust partner connectivity and real-time visibility, Sterling Commerce enables companies to proactively respond to supply disruptions and improve market responsiveness while lowering inventory carrying costs and improving operational efficiencies.
The Software as a Service model is ideally suited to deliver immediate returns for customers. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand offers customers an on-demand, real-time visibility solution that instantly connects supply chain partners and their critical supply chain processes to allow visibility via a single dashboard view. By providing simplified partner on-boarding via a hosted network solution, partner implementation time and costs required for setting up the community are greatly reduced.
True Value, one of the worlds largest retailer-owned hardware cooperatives is one of the companys first customers to purchase this new on-demand solution. The company will use Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand to improve the accuracy and efficiency of its global supply chain.
Supply Chain Visibility On Demand is a hosted network service available through Sterling Collaboration Network (SCN). The SCN suite of services includes Sterling Information BrokerSM, Community Services, Translation Services, Visibility Services, and Hosted Application Services, which can be used for automating business processes between customers, partners, and suppliers. It has managed as many as one billion business-to-business (B2B) documents in one month with more than 99.9 per cent reliability, allowing customers, vendors, and suppliers to reliably integrate their electronic processing.
1A: View from Above: Global Supply Chain Visibility in a World Gone Flat, Aberdeen Group, September, 2007.
About Sterling Commerce
Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), helps customers thrive in a global economy by connecting their business communities, processes, people and technology. More than 30,000 customers worldwide including 80 per cent of the Fortune 500 use Sterling Commerce solutions for business process integration and supply chain management to improve profitability inside and outside their company walls. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Sterling Commerce has offices in 19 countries and most major cities around the world.
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