August 11, 2004, Columbus, Ohio – Business integration leader Sterling Commerce today announced it is being recognized by Wegmans Food Markets for synchronizing item data with more than 100 of its suppliers.
Sterling Commerce is the first solution provider to enable the supermarket chain to bring a broad level of data synchronization to its supplier community. By leveraging the Sterling TR2 Hosted solution, Wegmans’ suppliers can optimize collaborative relationships with the retailer, reducing invoice discrepancies and product delivery errors, and speeding to market new product introductions and existing item changes.
According to a June 2003 study, “Data Synchronization Proof of Concept: Case Studies from Leading Manufacturers,” by A.T. Kearney for the grocery industry, data synchronization efficiency yields an annual profit of $1 million for every $1 billion in sales. Data synchronization offerings like the Sterling TR2 Hosted solution can help customers experience numerous operational efficiencies such as: one percent or more reduction in inventory costs, two to four percent reduction in out of stocks, thousands of hours saved in warehouse and direct store deliveries and five to 10 percent reduction in time spent reconciling invoices.
“The Sterling TR2 Hosted solution supports the essential UCCnet™ Services compliance and data synchronization needs by helping our suppliers improve the quality and accuracy of business transactions, and enabling the application of new business integration technologies,” said Marianne Timmons, director of business-to-business for Wegmans Food Markets. “Wegmans is delighted to see a data synchronization leader such as Sterling Commerce helping our trading community realize the business benefits of accurate, synchronized data.”
“Being recognized by a data synchronization pioneer such as Wegmans is further evidence that our business integration solutions and services are unmatched in helping key customers such as retailers optimize their business-to-business relationships and remove unnecessary costs from their supply chains,” said Nolan Rosen, vice president of global marketing at Sterling Commerce. “This implementation marks another achievement for Sterling Commerce as the first and only solution provider to enable more than 100 Wegmans suppliers to synchronize item data using the UCC-defined global standards.”
The Sterling TR2 Hosted solution enables customers to easily load and maintain item information, validate product information, publish item information to retailers through UCCnet Services and handle reporting and automated status updates. It also offers alternative connections to country catalogs and data pools beyond UCCnet Services such as EAN, ECCnet, WWRE, Transora, and SINFOS.
The software has successfully passed a series of intensive interoperability tests confirming the product’s ability to provide valid and functional UCCnet Extensible Markup Language (XML) messaging needed to synchronize item data through the UCCnet Services making it UCCnet Synchronization Suite-certified.
