Sterling Commerce buys Comergent to unify manufacturing supply chain order management

The company says that facilities for managing order capture and fulfilment across systems, sites, companies and countries that its successfully implemented for retail supply chains will now be extended to manufacturing supply chains across industries. Joel Reed, vice president of marketing at Sterling Commerce, says the goal is helping mid-size to large manufacturers to simplify and shorten sales and order fulfilment cycle times and thus to reduce supply chain costs by integrating Comergent’s systems with its own to provide an end-to-end solutions. Says Reed: “In the retail industries Sterling has had strong solutions, but not sop much in manufacturing. So our combined solution will allow us to do for manufacturing what we have been doing for retail for some time.” He points to two main drivers. The first is convergence of what are currently often complex processes for capturing orders (due to complex product configurations, web selling, demand variation and fragmentation in the channels) and then fulfilling them – because of the sheer number of suppliers, contractors and again distributors and channels. The second has to do with larger manufacturers’ plans to consolidate their disparate (and costly) systems arising out of mergers, historical point solutions for business management, production, warehousing, logistics and so on. “They have five to eight year projects to bring about consolidation but we can ride right across that existing layer of different systems,” says Reed. “We can raise that up one layer to let them see what’s going on right across order management and fulfilment, wherever it’s happening, without them ripping and replacing operational systems. “They can get the value now while they’re figuring out the future for their internal infrastructures… Also that applies to their external systems in the supply chain as well. We can lay across those different systems as well and handle multi-channel and distributed order management. We can help them to look at best, most efficient fulfilment opportunities from across their sites and channels.” In fact, Comergent’s applications cover order management capabilities from account management to configuration to tools for guided sales. They also support custom proposals and are claimed to provide visibility into field quoting. Both Sterling Commerce and Comergent are built on services oriented architectures, and the pair say users wil be able to add functionality incrementally at lowest total cost of ownership. “Both Comergent and Sterling Commerce share a vision for seamless supply chain execution,” says Jean Kovacs, president and CEO of Comergent. “Today, the reality is that enterprises must sell broader offerings and reach new markets to grow their business and remain competitive. “Together, the respective strengths of our solutions will help enterprises respond to their growing customer and partner demands for optimised customer experience channel synchronisation and reduced order fulfilment cycle times.”