Logistics technology: SPS Commerce rolls out trading partner application upgrades
Jeff Berman, Group News Editor -- Logistics Management, 10/29/2008
MINNEAPOLIS—SPS Commerce, a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) Electronic Data Interchange services, announced this week it has rolled out a SaaS platform for trading partner integration and an application that allows shippers to more efficiently process and fulfill orders.
The trading partner integration offering—entitled Trading Partner Intelligence Service—leverages SPS Commerce’s library of pre-built integrations, data, and relationships to provide consumer product goods manufacturers and retailers with insight on order fulfillment supply chain retail performance, according to the company. And Trading Partner Intelligence Service enables shippers to lower total cost of ownership in aggregating and analyzing data from multiple sources like 3PLs, sourcing companies, trading partners, and carriers, among others, through various modules that focus on:
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providing suppliers with visibility to sales metrics across customer by region, market, store, product, timeframe;
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fill rates from warehouse management and sales systems, shipment status data and perfect order scorecards from retail trading partners
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an end-to-end intelligence module that helps suppliers determine causes of good and bad performance;
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a perfect order intelligence module that provides performance indicators across all perfect order metrics for retailers; and
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a vendor performance intelligence module, which is a portal with key performance data and provides retailers with secure access to selected data and allows vendors to better manage their performance against retailers expectations.
SPS Commerce Chief Strategy Officer Jim Frome told LM that a major component of the retail supply chain is gathering and collecting data from disparate systems such as sourcing countries, factories, and suppliers.
“Putting data together to maintain and fulfill orders and buying these systems to maintain it is something a lot of companies have not gotten around to doing,” said Frome. “This application leverages our various data sources in a consolidated format as one big pile of information and is the result of building the legwork of mapping various sources, leveraging things we have already done and pre-integrating it with various applications like—NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, and JDA—that are commonly used in this market and are targeted for retailers and suppliers.”
Frome also explained that the Trading Partner Intelligence Service is built on a multidimensional data base and data model to support the six service modules that are part of the platform. This data model, he said, allows SPS Commerce to take data from various sources and transform them into a common format.
Forrester Research analyst Ken Vollmer said that the Trading Partner Intelligence Service application provides end users with benefits on various fronts, with a major component being able to serve as a “hosted alternative for targeted supply chain reporting that is easy to set up…and ensures quick ROI.”
Vollmer also said that the hosted delivery model enables companies to gain access to supply chain information that when compared to other models offers a lower implementation cost, lower levels of complexity, and comprehensive supply chain information “out of the box.”
Saas Scan and Pack: SPS Commerce has also released its Scan and Pack and Label Service that it said helps suppliers process a large number or large variety of shipments to streamline the picking and packing process, as well as meet complex fulfillments from retailers.
It does this by cross-referencing item data, producing pick lists that automates the picking and packing process and then leverages its Trading Partner data to eliminate data entry for Advanced Ship Notices. At this point, its label service creates UCC-128 barcode labels for shipment according to each retailers requirements, said SPS Commerce.
The Scan and Pack and Label Service, said SPS Commerce, allows users to: view all orders that need fulfillment from the supplier's EDI account; sort orders by age, ship by date or order value; print pick tickets sorted by physical warehouse location for optimized picking; scan items into each carton; print UCC-128 labels as boxes are being packed; Automatically generate ASNs; and set up localized cross references for vendor part numbers.
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