In response to customer demand for an integrated set of products for managing B2B relationships, Sterling Commerce yesterday released the Gentran Integration Suite (GIS) 4.0, software that can manage B2B communications, translation, enterprise integration, business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring and provides business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
"The competitive advantage over the next few years will all be about being efficient in working with partners and customers," said Nolan Rosen, chief marketing officer, Sterling Commerce, in an interview. "There is a need to integrate business processes and systems outside the four walls of the enterprise, as well as inside the enterprise."
Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of SBC Communications, has a partnership with QAD Inc. to help address the needs of manufacturers. Sterling provides QAD with UCCnet data synchronization and compliance capabilities via a plug-in to QAD's MFG/PRO software, giving customers an integrated product. The integrated offering allows data to be easily transferred between the Sterling Commerce's BPM functionality and QAD's ERP offering.
ViewSonic Corp., a producer of visual display products, will use the suite's capabilities to enhance operating practices and profitability by improving interaction with retailers, distributors and online channel customers, according to a statement. With GIS 4.0, ViewSonic hopes to eliminate supplier delays, errors and inefficiencies to achieve faster product introductions and deliveries to retailers and channel partners.
"Our goal is to deliver top quality service to our customers," said Jordan Beseiso, global business-to-business integration manager at ViewSonic Corp, in a statement. "By implementing a multi-enterprise collaboration strategy using GIS, we've been able to extend the value of our Oracle Corp. ERP system to suppliers and customers while giving ViewSonic business managers access to the right information about events and exceptions to make timely decisions."
GIS 4.0 can provide an integrated platform that can conduct business with globally distributed business partners, without the cost and complexity involved with sewing together a myriad of solutions from other vendors, according to Sterling. "We have been developing these functionalities for four to five years," Rosen said. "Over time we added more pieces to the solution. However, customers wanted it all in one package so they wouldn't have to integrate various products from multiple vendors" to perform effective BPM. And although GIS 4.0 has many different modules, companies can gain faster ROI by rolling it out in a "staged oriented launch," rather than deploying the entire system at once, Rosen added.
This new suite is built on Sterling's Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA), a service-oriented architecture (SOA). As an SOA, GIS 4.0 can support manufacturers' growth objectives by giving users the ability to manage multi-enterprise business processes without the added cost of deploying multiple integration solutions, according to a Sterling Commerce statement.
GIS 4.0 offers several new capabilities, including: business activity monitoring (BAM) and enhanced business process management (BPM) for visibility into business processes; graphical processing modeling to make it easy to automate business processes; new federated capabilities that monitor business processes across multiple instances of GIS and alert users to transaction inefficiencies and inaccuracies; and improved reporting capabilities that offer an interface for Cognos Corp. reports.