DENVER, Sterling Commerce Customer Connection, Aug. 23, 2007 — At its annual user conference, Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, today announced the winners of the Customer Connection 2007 Innovation Awards, which recognize innovation in using technology to address complex business challenges. The winners represent a variety of industries but have one common denominator: They have found a method to connect with their business communities in a way that has accelerated growth while reducing costs.
Companies recognized for their leadership in innovation included:
- Ball Corp., one of the world's leading suppliers of metal and plastic packaging to the beverage, food and household-products industries.
- Best Buy, North America’s number one specialty consumer electronics retail store.
- CF Industries, one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer products in North America.
- GE Money, the consumer and small business financial services unit of General Electric.
- Panalpina World Transport Ltd., one of the world's leading suppliers of forwarding and logistics services.
- Parker-Hannifin, the global leader in motion and control technologies.
“In today’s global economy, companies face complex business process integration challenges — challenges in how they work with their business community,” said Eric Meerschaert, vice president of global marketing for Sterling Commerce. “These companies are innovators in their industries and have found and implemented best practices and solutions to overcome barriers to success, such as rapidly changing business and technical requirements and cumbersome manual and inflexible automated processes.”
As one example of innovation, the information technology department at Ball Corp. was able to align successfully with the business to provide additional value in meeting Ball’s business objectives. With a goal to provide its customers with an overall experience that makes them want to continue doing business with the company, Ball Corp. used Sterling Collaborative Network and Gentran Integration Suite™ (GIS) to streamline and automate the business processes that link the company with its trading partners. The company increased the quality of data, improved customer service and decreased costs.
Another company recognized for innovation was Best Buy, which thrives by putting the customer at the core of its business. The company used the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite to provide a consistent multi-channel customer experience and order-fulfillment process across its BestBuy.com site and retail stores.
GE Money was recognized for its strategic use of GIS as a business-to-business (B2B) communications platform to make its business more agile. GIS supports multiple communications and security protocols and enables the company to more easily accommodate customer and partner requirements. In addition, the company gained a flexible, automated interface to easily integrate new partners, new business processes and new protocols. This interface enables the company to respond quickly to new opportunities.
In addition to its work with these companies, Sterling Commerce has a customer base of more than 30,000 that includes all of the top 10 specialty retailers, nine of the top 10 CPG manufacturers and nine of the top 10 banking/financial services firms. Sterling Commerce provides business applications and integration solutions to help companies improve profitability, minimize risks and thrive in a global economy. The company’s business application solutions for multi-channel selling and fulfillment manage the end-to-end orchestration of complex order lifecycles. Its integration solutions for data and files, enterprise applications and B2B communications conquer complex process-integration challenges.
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 percent of the Fortune 500 – use Sterling Commerce solutions for business process integration, multi-channel selling, and supply chain execution 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. For more information, please go to www.sterlingcommerce.com.