Visibility on demand: Sterling Commerce unveils new supply chain collaboration solution
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/14/2008 12:50:00 PM
Sterling Commerce says True Value Company, one of the world’s largest retailer-owned hardware cooperatives, will be an early adopter of a new on-demand solution that promotes partner connectivity, process integration, and real-time visibility throughout a company’s extended supply chain.
The new offering—called Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand—was unveiled yesterday at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention and Expo.
Sterling executives say the solution addresses challenges that have been widely noted by industry analysts. For instance, they pointed to a September 2007 report out of Boston-based Aberdeen Group, which 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.”
Josh Hardy, global product line manager for Sterling Collaboration Network, says the new solution 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, Hardy says.
“Sterling Commerce understands the power of community, and has spent more than 30 years harnessing that power to deliver innovative solutions,” Hardy adds. “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.”
Hardy also says the on-demand model is ideally suited to deliver immediate returns for customers.
True Value plans to use Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand to improve the accuracy and efficiency of its global supply chain.
“Our mission is to provide outstanding service and product availability to our members and their customers,” says Steve Poplawski, senior VP, logistics & supply chain, for True Value Company. “Being able to leverage actionable information in a real-time environment allows us to move beyond reaction mode, and systematically fix deficiencies across our supply chain.”
