SDCExec.com |

New York — January 17, 2008 — Sterling Commerce has announced the availability of two new solutions to help retailers solve their supply-side challenges, Sterling Integrator Retail Edition and Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand. The solutions focus on the exchange and use of order and shipment information to reduce order-to-cash cycle time and are part of the company's vision to deliver a suite of solutions targeted at addressing supply-side challenges.

Sterling Commerce said complexity in the supplier world comes from two opposing forces: more demanding customers and more distributed, extended supply chains. Increasingly, customers are demanding better access to information about the status of their orders. Retailers are hampered in providing this access because they have limited — or, at best, delayed — access to critical order and shipment status information on the supply-facing side of their business. In addition to affecting customer satisfaction, this limited access also can affect retailers' profitability by resulting in increased stock-outs or requiring retailers to carry excess stock to buffer risk or pay increased expediting costs to avoid stock-outs. Sterling said its Integrator Retail Edition and Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand are designed to solve these problems through inventory and order status connectivity.

Sterling Integrator Retail Edition electronically links retailers to more of their suppliers, carriers and other supply chain intermediaries to address this issue by providing access to time-critical information. Sterling said Integrator Retail Edition is an any-to-any integration gateway that accommodates any direct-connect data format exchange with suppliers.

Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand, according to the provider, enables retailers to proactively respond to supply disruptions and improve market responsiveness by displaying and summarizing actionable supply chain information from all electronic trading partners and communities through a secure, reliable hosted infrastructure. It uses Sterling Commerce business-to-business integration expertise and its global supply chain community to maximize the number of supply chain partners with whom retailers do business.