New York – Jan. 14, 2008 — At the National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention and Expo, Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, today announced the availability of Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand, a new hosted solution that provides partner connectivity, process integration and real-time visibility throughout a company’s extended supply chain. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand instantly displays and summarizes actionable supply chain information from all electronic trading partners and communities through a secure, reliable hosted infrastructure. Sterling Commerce is demonstrating this product at its booth, number 2023.
By combining its 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 maximize 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 making.”
Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand addresses the visibility challenge by leveraging an existing community and minimizing 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 organizational and geopolitical 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 company’s 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 industry’s 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 on-demand model is ideally suited to deliver immediate returns for customers. It 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. 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 is one of the company’s first customers to purchase this new on-demand solution. (See related press release, “True Value Company Selects On Demand Sterling Commerce Solution to Improve Customer Service and Supply Chain Efficiency.”)
Supply Chain Visibility On Demand is a hosted network service available through 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 1 billion business-to-business documents in one month with more than 99.9 percent reliability, allowing customers, vendors and suppliers to reliably integrate their electronic processing.
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 fulfillment 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. More information on the company can be found at www.sterlingcommerce.com.
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A View from Above: Global Supply Chain Visibility in a World Gone Flat, Aberdeen Group, September, 2007.