With industry mandates changing communications standards, Visy required a single solution to support secure AS2 data communications across different lines of business to manage the exchange of data more efficiently with customers and suppliers.
While many companies have difficulty supporting AS2, Visy’s operations were complicated by managing three different AS2 systems in what had become a fragmented environment.
This process was expensive, difficult to manage, and resulted in less than adequate customer service.
“Following a review of the situation, we decided that we required one secure communications hub solution through which we could safely and securely transmit both our own transactional information as well as our suppliers’ purchase orders, forecasts, acknowledgments, advanced shipping notices and invoices," explains Jeffrey Ranchman, Manager eBusiness Solutions, Visy.
"At the same time, by consolidating centralised support through one AS2 gateway, we would reduce costs and enhance security.”
Following a market review of potential solutions, Visy decided to implement the Sterling Collaboration Network, a hosted service which provides secure connectivity and collaboration with customers and business partners.
It also delivers unprecedented visibility and control over the business processes shared with outside companies. In fact, Sterling Collaboration Network is the first network to offer the advantages of a full-service network, plus real-time visibility and control over all B2B operations.
“We assessed various solutions but decided to use Sterling Commerce as a standard for transmitting files to suppliers and customers in a strategy aimed at consolidating our multiple services," says Rochman.
"We were impressed with the Sterling Commerce offering in terms of service levels, integration with our existing infrastructure and the level of support available."
While Sterling Collaboration Network supports any data type or format and speeds document delivery, the service is enhanced through Sterling Managed AS2 Gateway which serves as a secure intermediary between Internet-based and non-Internet-based customers, managing all the differences in communications, format, content and security between transactions.
“With the addition of a Sterling Managed AS2 Gateway, Sterling Collaboration Network would enable Visy to comply with AS2 mandates without the expense of us having to build our own complex infrastructure for secure Internet communication and document tracking," says Rochman.
"As the system is hosted, we could outsource the entire functionality to Sterling Commerce without the need to add infrastructure internally.
“In addition, as Sterling Commerce has such a strong heritage and track record in the financial services space with its Managed File Transfer product deployments, we were confident in the ability of the Sterling Collaboration Network to safeguard files against potential compromise.”
With the decision made to move ahead with Sterling Commerce in 2008, many of Visy’s top 100 customers, including leading FMCG organisations, have already migrated onto the Sterling Collaboration Network prior to the decommissioning of the three previous trading networks.
While orders are taken electronically from Visy’s customers’ production schedules as fast as they can plan their production requirements, the system also gives customer ownership of order placement.
Sterling Commerce provides the AS2 interface to Visy’s customers and partners that require AS2 communications, and receives documents from Visy’s AS2 customers, decrypts them and forwards them to Visy via the company’s preferred protocol.
“Indeed, the customer transition over to Sterling Commerce has been extremely smooth with zero issues in terms of performance," says Rochman.
"The high level of redundancy, support and notification inherent with Sterling Commerce means we can cut down response times from 40 minutes to two minutes and eliminate downtime costs.
"In short, Sterling Commerce enables us to operate with zero downtime and to solve issues quickly,” he confirms.
For logistics operations, it means that truck drivers arriving at a customer site arrive with accurate documentation, unlike previous loads with the painful costs of mismatched data.
Currently, Sterling Commerce handles around 2,000 files per month, anticipated to grow to around 10,000 per month by the end of 2009.
The ability of Sterling Commerce to scale to and add customers on an ongoing basis is an enormous bonus. Indeed, another benefit has been the fast development time in being able to implement Sterling Commerce.
“Having to do this ourselves would have been terribly time consuming," says Rochman. By hosting with Sterling Commerce, this time has been greatly reduced. We were up and running in no time.”
Seamless automation and integration with the company’s existing business flows has also been advantageous in terms of the human resources dimension.
Visy now only needs to deploy a level 1 help desk employee to solve any issues.
“All up, with Sterling Commerce we have 99.99 per cent uptime and can quickly resolve any issue that may arise. It doesn’t get better than that,” adds Rochman.
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