Continuing its transition from a vendor of business-to-business integration software products and services to a provider of supply chain automation and visibility applications, Sterling Commerce today unveiled an on-demand version of its supply chain visibility product.
By analyzing supply chain transaction information transmitted over value-added networks such as the existing Sterling Collaboration Network, the new Supply Chain Visibility On Demand service gives manufacturers real-time visibility into how effectively their supply networks are operating. The service is available on an annual subscription basis, and the cost is based on the volume of purchase and service orders generated by a given organization.
Supply Chain Visibility On Demand aggregates the data generated through EDI and other B2B documents and presents different views of it via pre-defined reports and real-time dashboards.
The net result, said Richard Douglass, Sterling's global manufacturing industry executive, is that manufacturers struggling to orchestrate increasingly global and complex supply networks can more easily see and react to potential problems.
"As supply chains become more global and have longer, more variable lead times, you end up with some unpleasant surprises if you don't have visibility into real-time or near real-time information," Douglass said.
Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand includes several pre-built reports that track different aspects of inbound and outbound supply chain performance. For example, customers can use 15 pre-written reports to track inbound supplier performance in such areas as purchase order acknowledgment timeliness, on-time shipment, and advance shipping notice timeliness.
The service also includes 10 reports that track outbound supply chain performance, including invoice price matching by customer, which can help manufacturers determine whether invoice prices match purchase order prices. The service can also alert users when outbound supply network performance exceeds defined parameters. This helps manufacturers avoid violating customer service-level agreements, Douglass said.
The reports can be configured to present different views of the data to individuals managing different aspects of the supply chain, he explained.
In order to make use of the service, manufacturers and their supply chain partners need to exchange information electronically over an existing value-added network (VANs) such as the Sterling Collaboration Network. Sterling says it has 19,000 customers for its Collaboration Network.
In addition, Sterling uses gateways to provide access to 90 other VANs from its own network. As a result, 270,000 trading partners globally could use the new Supply Chain Visibility On Demand service.
According to Douglass, access to that large, existing trading partner community is what differentiates Supply Chain Visibility On Demand from similar on-demand visibility tools from competitors such as Kinaxis, e2Open, and SAP.
The SaaS product joins an on-premise version available from Sterling. While the on-premise product is easier to customize, Douglass said, the on-demand tool is easier to implement.
One company that plans to use Sterling Supply Chain Visibility On Demand is hardware retailer True Value Co. In an interview with Managing Automation, True Value Senior Vice President for Logistics and Supply Chain Steve Poplawski said the company plans to deploy the tool in July. True Value hopes the tool will allow it to spot and react to potentially costly supply problems earlier.
"We need to see in as close as possible to real time when something didn't happen that was supposed to," Poplawski said. "Those kinds of things lead to stock-outs. If we can be aware of the problem right when it occurs, we have a better chance of reacting to it quicker."
At True Value, the Sterling on-demand product will replace a home-grown supply chain visibility tool that was limited to purchase order exception reporting, Poplawski said.