New product is designed to highlight supply hiccups as soon as they are reported.
AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce is expected to unveil a new supply chain application at its user conference underway this week in Las Vegas. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility is designed to monitor business-to-business transactions and notify staff of events that require attention, such as a shipping delay that could cause an inventory shortage.
AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce is expected to unveil a new supply chain application at its user conference underway this week in Atlanta. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility is designed to monitor business-to-business transactions and notify staff of events that require attention, such as a shipping delay that could cause an inventory shortage.
The new product is focused on the inbound side of the supply chain. It keeps tabs on data that manufacturers or retailers receive from their suppliers and trading partners, such as inventory reports, purchase orders and shipment notifications. Built-in exception handling features alert supply chain managers to significant events, and companies can program the software to take actions automatically.
The goal of Sterling Supply Chain Visibility is to help companies better manage the performance of their inbound supply chain, says Cory Wiegert, vice president of product management for applications at Sterling Commerce. By managing supply chain exceptions, companies can react more quickly and more appropriately to disruptions, he says.”
If your demand increases on one side, or if there’s a delay in shipping, you can adjust your business accordingly by pulling from your safety stock or fulfilling from different warehouse,” Wiegert says. “It gives you control to monitor this external activity and really manage your suppliers.”Sterling Commerce already has a range of supply chain software focused on the demand side of operations.
It gained key parts of its application portfolio when it acquired order management and warehousing specialist Yantra in early 2005. Sterling Commerce added logistics and transportation management capabilities with its acquisition of Nistevo in a deal that closed last month.Meanwhile, Sterling Commerce continues to offer its traditional business-to-business connectivity wares, including electronic data interchange (EDI) services, supplier collaboration services, and integration software for linking corporate systems.
Deployed with the supply chain applications, Sterling Commerce’s network services can feed EDI messages and transactional details into the Supply Chain Visibility application to help create a consolidated view of supply chain operations.
“We did an analysis on the types of messages running through our collaboration network, and north of 40% of the overall messages were supply chain related. So it makes a lot of sense to be able to monitor and present the data in a business meaningful way,” Wiegert says.Companies that aren’t using Sterling Commerce’s network services can populate the Supply Chain Visibility application with data from other messaging feeds. The software is vendor agnostic, Wiegert says.
