Sterling Commerce Further Extends End-to-End Visibility of Order-to-Cash Business Process
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New Sterling Collaboration Network Services Prevent Penalty Fees, Speed Response to Supply Chain Events and Build More Effective Partner Relationships
SAN DIEGO, June 19 / At the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Conference, Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and an AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, today announced several new hosted services available through its Sterling Collaboration Network that optimize business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. These new services enable business managers to make enhanced, real-time decisions about business transactions affecting their cash flow cycle. In addition, IT managers can visibly track network traffic and better ensure on-time delivery of critical business documents.
The new and enhanced services from Sterling Commerce include Visibility Manager, Intelligent Routing, and Report Visibility. Sterling Commerce has extended its Visibility Manager service to include payment remittance, further broadening its end-to-end view across the order-to-cash cycle. Other new services include Intelligent Routing services for non-EDI (electronic data integration) processing and Report Visibility capabilities, which provide an "electronic dashboard" to monitor document activity and trading partner performance. With these services, Sterling also extends its network into South America, becoming the first network provider to deliver end-to-end, aggregated visibility and intelligent routing services on the network to regions beyond North America.
"This announcement demonstrates our continued commitment to our network customers with new hosted services that improve management of critical business processes," said Scott Pulsipher, vice president of product management at Sterling Commerce. "Our network safeguards billions of transactions between business partners. By adding improved visibility, reporting and intelligence about the documents in those transactions, we are providing companies with a competitive advantage for their business."
Visibility Manager offers an aggregated (360 degree) view of the order-to-cash business process and its related document transactions, such as purchase orders or advanced ship notices, sent through the business process network by customers and suppliers. Today, Sterling Commerce has added payments remittance to the documents that can be tracked. Through this consolidated view, IT managers can respond quickly to anomalies and ensure timely delivery of mission-critical documents. By offering data/information within a graphical, easy-to-read context, holistic trend analysis is now possible in a way that line-of-business managers can more easily manage their community. Armed with this information, IT managers and line-of-business managers can better align B2B communications with business objectives.
The new Intelligent Routing service, which includes content-based or context-based file routing, provides the flexibility of sending and receiving information in many different format types, not just the traditional EDI documents. Whether the document is organized in a structured or unstructured format, the Intelligent Routing service can route the document to the appropriate trading partner with efficiency and flexibility. More and more, businesses are trading more than EDI documents; they are trading XML, flat files, or documents from their back-end systems in an application format. This new service enables a company to collaborate with more of their trading partners by sharing many different formats of data beyond just EDI files to reduce costs related to manual processes and speed and simplify collaboration, which builds stronger partner relationships.
The new Report Visibility service offers an easy-to-understand, customizable graphical dashboard that enables IT managers to better track EDI file movement. Associated intelligent reporting also provides metrics to facilitate process improvement and performance measurement to maximize the community business process within the supply chain.
Visibility Manager, Intelligent Routing and Report Visibility services are just the latest hosted network innovations from Sterling Commerce. Other hosted services the company offers include:
o Data synchronization to help suppliers quickly and efficiently meet customer demands to begin synchronizing data through iSYNCH (formerly UCCnet and Transora).
o Managed AS2 Gateway to help companies meet multi-customer requests to communicate via AS2 with limited in-house resources.
o Sterling Web Forms to enable supply chain integration through a single browser-based connection.
About Sterling Collaboration Network
The Sterling Collaboration Network is the market leader in electronic data interchange (EDI) and managed file transfer (MFT), with more than 200 million invoices flowing through its infrastructure each year. It incorporates the advantages of a full-service private network within a real-time, event-driven environment. More than 300,000 EDI-enabled businesses in the world use Sterling Collaboration Network to exchange business documents electronically with anyone, in any way, regardless of protocols, application format and preferred communication methods.
Built on Sterling's Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA), the Sterling Collaboration Network can host both integration services as well as applications. The fast, safe and secure transmission of integration services and applications both within and outside an enterprise's four walls results in new cost savings, process improvements and a competitive advantage for a customer's business. Sterling continually invests in the infrastructure over time to offer extended availability, near real-time data turn-around times, and robust restoration services applicable to any industry.
About Sterling Commerce
The year 2006 marks 31 years of Sterling Commerce leadership and expertise in extending processes beyond the edge of the enterprise to enable visible business with suppliers, customers, partners and employees. A subsidiary of ATT Inc. (NYSE:T), the company is one of the world's largest providers of multi-enterprise collaboration solutions. With nearly 30,000 customers worldwide, Sterling Commerce builds collaborative, multi-enterprise communities for customers in the retail, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, financial services, health care and telecommunications industries. For detailed, up-to-date information about Sterling Commerce and its solutions, visit www.sterlingcommerce.com/ .
Source: Sterling Commerce
CONTACT: Emily Hall of Sterling Commerce, +1-614-790-8607, or Brian Pelletier of Fleishman-Hillard, +1-314-982-8704
Web site: www.sterlingcommerce.com/
