At the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), today announced enhancements to its supply-chain applications portfolio that benefit both Sterling Commerce customers and their extended trading communities. These enhancements reduce the complexity of managing supply-chain execution, enabling companies to create new growth opportunities by differentiating themselves and increasing revenue.

"Our supply-chain applications incorporate industry best practices for managing complex processes within an organization and at the edge of the supply chain, where companies must work seamlessly with customers, partners, and suppliers to compete effectively and increase revenues, with a leading-edge technology framework. As a result, we consistently deliver new value in helping our customers expedite their return on their investment," said Cory Wiegert, vice president of global applications product management, Sterling Commerce. "This strategy has gained us recognition from industry experts at AMR Research, Forrester, and Gartner this year and lets us continually lead the industry in helping companies meet today's business challenges and prepare for future opportunities."

The Sterling Commerce supply-chain applications portfolio is uniquely designed to manage the dynamic and complex processes associated with order management and fulfillment, supply-side visibility, and warehouse and transportation management within and outside the four walls of an organization. It provides an integrated end-to-end solution that allows companies to have improved visibility and control over their entire supply chain - from order to shipment - that results in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Sterling Commerce has enhanced its portfolio with new capabilities that leverage its industry expertise and leadership in business process management to help companies better serve their customers' unique demands. These enhancements include:

* New process modeling capabilities that open new fulfillment channels and offer support for new delivery options. For example, companies can now model new sourcing rules to accommodate new fulfillment channels, such as a pickup in-store.
* Out-of-the-box workflows that help address exception scenarios encountered in the order-administration process, as well as customer-initiated order inquiries common in a business-to-consumer environment.
* New task-based retail-order entry and modification user interfaces that provide the ability to handle special orders, services and a mix of fulfillment methods of different lines on the same order.

New capabilities that build on the company's powerful application foundation to improve the return on investment in Sterling Commerce software include:

* A new and intuitive user interface that enables quicker on-boarding of customer service agents.
* New and efficient task-based user interfaces specialized for each store role to reduce training time and costs.
* A new alerts framework that improves exception handling and reduces costs and errors. This framework simplifies the process of handling exception workflows by intelligently routing alerts based on priority and supporting context-sensitive alert resolution.

These enhancements are just the latest supply-chain application innovations from Sterling Commerce. Other supply chain-related news includes:

* A new integration kit between Sterling Multi-Channel Order Management and IBM WebSphere Commerce. Together, these solutions provide a complete order capture-to-fulfillment solution that helps companies to optimize their entire order cycle and drive high levels of customer satisfaction. (See related release, "Sterling Commerce and IBM Integrate Solutions to Help Companies Optimize Their Order Lifecycle," Oct. 11, 2006.)

* Sterling Supply Chain Visibility, a new application that combines real-time visibility of supplier information with proactive exception management, helps companies better manage the performance of their in-bound supply chain.

(Source: Business Wire)