Sterling touts B2B automation despite smorgasbord ERP

It’s the result of bringing together Sterling’s acquisitions over the last three years, and particularly Yantra and Comergent. “Yantra was good at order management and inventory management,” explains David Hogg, industry marketing manager. “Comergent excelled at electronic store front catalogues and was strong with tier one high tech manufacturers, such as NEC, Hitachi, Symbol, Cisco and Pitney Bowes – as well as Agfa and Dupont in life sciences and companies like Goodrich in automotive and aerospace.” Integrating these, he says, enables companies still stuck with a mix of SAP, Oracle and other ERP systems across their divisions to build end-to-end business processes, automated all the way from order capture to fulfilment and payment. Hogg asserts that too many of even the big names have automated web store fronts that, behind the scenes, still involve “extraordinarily manual” processes. “It’s common, for example, for fulfilment to be passed onto a third party transportation company with no direct electronic communication.” And the beauty of Sterling’s new, configurable package, he says, is that whereas it would take many man months to manipulate multiple ERP systems to align with the order and fulfilment processes, this system comes largely pre-configured. “E-store fronts can go up and live for categories of merchandise in 90 to 120 days. Compare that with ERP companies that would be struggling to do the requirements collection in that time frame.”