Sterling Commerce New Business Intelligence Strategy Takes its Market-Leading Supply Chain Applications to the Next Level

Melbourne, VIC.  6 April 2010 – Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc (NYSE:T) company, makes real-time intelligence in the supply chain a reality with its new business intelligence (BI) strategy for Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, the company’s collaborative supply chain applications.  As part of the strategy, the company is the first in the industry to embed BI into the foundation of a supply chain application as a way to expedite its ability to deliver intelligent applications and simplify ongoing maintenance. 

The company’s strategy is to make applications smarter by embedding BI into critical supply chain processes.  In this way, the applications will provide customers with the data about key performance indicators (KPIs) they need to drive business performance and improve decision making processes.  Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, which manages the entire inquiry-to-cash process across all selling and fulfilment channels, has leveraged these capabilities to enhance how users make critical decisions by providing all available information regarding performance to enable customers to:

-       Make process improvements by leveraging reports and dashboards of historical data “on the process”,

-       Improve decision-making “in the process” with real-time context-sensitive information at the point of execution, and

-       Automate decision-making and/or modify a selling and fulfilment process flow by leveraging enabling embedded BI to “drive the process”.

“When you look at business intelligence, most companies offer capabilities that report on the process, focused on trends, not real-time execution data.  The key is to leverage analytics technology to provide data to users when they are engaged in the process, enabling the applications to drive processes, rather than simply report or alert on them,” said Cory Wiegert, vice president, Applications Product Line, at Sterling Commerce.  “By embedding analytics in Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, instead of treating them as a separate application, Sterling Commerce has leapfrogged any other supply chain applications provider.”

Sterling Commerce has built data marts within Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite that make BI seamless and available to every process.  In addition, the company has embedded BI capabilities into specific workflows or scenarios to optimise those operations  In this way, customers can execute processes automatically in order to improve productivity, reduce manual errors, and speed response times.  For example, solutions within the Suite will be able to: 

-               Automatically reallocate constrained inventory based on priorities, such as customer types, channel, geography, time frame, etc., to ensure a retailer’s “most important customer” receives inventory, and

-               Automatically determine the maximum discount that can be offered to a customer based on their individual order and credit history to eliminate the need for escalation and improve the quote to order conversion rate.