Sterling Commerce Enhances Warehouse Management Solution to Help Companies Improve Their Labour Use

Tuesday, 27 March 2007 13:54

Melbourne, 27 March 2007  – Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, today announced the latest version of the Sterling Networked Warehouse Management Solution (nWMS), which helps make warehouse operations more efficient through better planning and reporting for labor resources.  The new version improves the software’s ability to capture productivity data and create reports based on that activity, making it possible to do more dynamic deployment of labour and more accurate billing for services delivered.   

Sterling nWMS has added two new modules – Resource Planning and Activity Reporting Manager – and enhanced its Productivity Manager module.  Sterling nWMS enables companies to better manage inventory, labour and processes across a distributed warehouse network of diverse facilities.  With the increased visibility provided by the new modules, companies are better able to understand and allocate resources across their distributed operations.
 
The new Resource Planning module provides increased visibility into labour performance within the warehouse for improved operational productivity.  It verifies in real-time if demands can be fulfilled with available capacity and, when capacity falls short, helps assign resources to cover the shortfall.  Resource Manager graphically depicts the balance of workload and resource availability and enables “what if” scenarios to help organisations manage demand variability, leading to on-time fulfillment and optimal resource utilisation.  In addition, it monitors activity with real-time views of operations to enable continuous improvement for increased productivity.

The new Activity Reporting Manager module ensures accurate billing for tasks executed, enabling companies to understand the true cost to serve multiple clients or divisions. This capability is essential in helping companies with multi-tenant situations, such as third-party logistics providers or fulfillment houses, better manage their facilities for all their clients.
 
The Productivity Manager module now offers an innovative new method for creating labour standard benchmarks.  By creating a benchmark based on an analysis of historical task execution data instead of engineering standards, Productivity Manager provides labor benchmarks that can be implemented easily and kept current, a challenge for most warehouse operations.  

With its service-oriented architecture and process-centric modeling capabilities, Sterling Networked Warehouse Management Solution (nWMS) delivers unprecedented supply chain management process agility.  It is highly adaptable, enabling rapid process change to ensure consistency across a multi-site warehouse operation while providing for facility-specific configuration.  Sterling nWMS provides a central point of control over complex warehouse operations and across multiple facilities of varying types.  Its support for radio frequency identification (RFID) and materials-handling integration, and robust planning, execution and measurement tools for distribution managers brings operational discipline to complex warehouse operations.  

About Sterling Commerce

Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), helps 80 percent of the FORTUNE® 500 thrive in a global economy by solving complex business process challenges. The company’s innovative software and services integrate customers’ systems ? inside and outside the four walls of the enterprise ? so companies can conduct business without borders.  Sterling Commerce solutions help customers adopt best practices in e-sales, supply chain execution, payment processing and business-to-business integration.  The solutions also give executives and front-line managers greater visibility inside and outside the enterprise in order to improve profitability, reduce costs and minimise risk.  Sterling Commerce enables businesses to innovate key processes in real time, while continuing to deploy ERP or transaction system infrastructures. With more than 30,000 customers worldwide, Sterling Commerce has unparalleled experience in retail, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, financial services, supply chain, logistics, and telecommunications. More information on Sterling Commerce can be found at www.sterlingcommerce.com.