Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. has announced Sterling Supply Chain Visibility, a new application that automates and provides collaborative execution of the entire supply management process

Sterling Supply Chain Visibility combines real-time visibility of supplier information with proactive exception management to enable companies to better manage the performance of their inbound supply chain.  This combination results in better inventory allocation, improved customer satisfaction and reduced operational costs.

"Sterling Commerce has combined its expertise in business-to-business connectivity - as the industry's leading provider of secure file transfer and electronic data interchange solutions - with its deep supply chain management application capabilities to deliver a new way of managing supply chain exceptions," said Cory Wiegert, vice president of global applications product management, for Sterling Commerce.  "The primary means of identifying exceptions today relies heavily on manual mechanisms like fax, e-mail and phone, which are costly to manage and error-prone.  We are the only company that delivers connectivity across the entire supply chain, as well as applications with process and event intelligence to effectively automate the exception process." 

With the complexity of today's global supply chains, it is a competitive advantage for companies to have visibility into their entire supplier community and manage the community based on real-time information.  Shared processes, those that involve interaction with other companies, are harder to coordinate and synchronise.  Today's businesses require visibility into shared processes more than ever before, as they rapidly change and globally extend themselves, creating global supplier communities that include third-party logistics providers, outsourced operations, and decentralised organisations.

"Collaborative inbound logistics can significantly improve and optimise inbound logistics costs, moving companies from a model where inbound processes are fragmented and non-integrated to one that is integrated and dynamically optimised to reduce costs while improving responsiveness," said Greg Aimi, research director at AMR Research (1).

Sterling Supply Chain Visibility was developed by leveraging Sterling Commerce expertise in connecting businesses electronically and its flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver a solution that helps companies to better communicate with and gain control over suppliers.  It is unique in the industry in delivering:

- Real-time visibility with suppliers and supply trading partners to improve the management and monitoring of inbound inventory, purchase orders and shipments;
 
- Business process management to effectively automate manual processes, resulting in the ability to adapt quickly to changing business situations with suppliers; and

- Exception management that provides full alerting, notification, and automated action capabilities, resulting in higher operational performance and customer satisfaction.

Sterling Supply Chain Visibility is part of the Sterling Commerce supply chain applications portfolio.  The portfolio manages the dynamic and complex processes associated with warehousing, distributed order management, supply chain visibility and transportation management.  It provides an integrated end-to-end solution that enables companies to have improved visibility and control over their entire supply chain - from order to shipment - resulting in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

(1) Greg Aimi, AMR Research, "Retailers Save Money by Controlling Inbound Logistics", Tuesday, October 25, 2005