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, Managing Automation reported.

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.

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.