Saint-Gobain Streamlines Supply Chain Transactions

Saint-Gobain Corp., a building materials manufacturer and distributor, has purchased Sterling Business Integration Suite from AT&T. Saint-Gobain will use the solution to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and automate business processes among its customers and suppliers with the aim of achieving enhanced productivity, improved supply chain management and a stronger competitive edge.

The Saint-Gobain Corporation, an entity of the Saint-Gobain Group, manufactures a range of building products, high-performance materials and glass containers and is a distributor of building materials with 330 locations throughout the United States. Its business depends on a complex network of disparate systems and processes through which it delivers high quality building products.

Saint-Gobain will utilize the integration-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings in the Sterling solution as the communications standard among its U.S. business divisions and with the company’s network of customers and suppliers to automate the exchange of business documents—such as purchase orders, acknowledgements and invoices—in EDI, XML or flat-file formats. As a result, the company expects to: improve overall cycle times from order to payment; facilitate on-time delivery to its customers; and optimize its supplier relationships by utilizing real-time reports to monitor and analyze supplier performance and enforce service level agreements (SLAs).

Sterling Business Integration Suite provides connections to over 90 other public and private networks and more than 280,000 established trading pairs. It automates costly manual business processes by eliminating paper-based transactions and providing end-to-end visibility and control over Saint Gobain’s internal and business-to-business (B2B) processes. It also consolidates information from each division’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to enable the company to gain a complete view of inventory. Saint-Gobain’s abrasives business division leverages these capabilities in a fully managed environment to outsource their B2B process management activities at less cost and resource utilization than doing them via in-house operations.

AT&T and Saint-Gobain have a long-standing relationship whereby AT&T has been providing the company with wireless services, wide-area network (WAN) and WAN-based services, and now e-commerce applications and services. Based on the success in the U.S., Saint-Gobain plans to implement these solutions on a global basis.