Situation
ViewSonic Corporation is a leading global provider of visual display solutions, including plasma and LCD products, for business, education, and consumer electronics markets.
The company is committed to meeting and exceeding its customers’ expectations in quality, value, and innovation by delivering the utmost in visual experiences. ViewSonic relies on an accurate sales forecast at least three months in advance to manufacture and deliver precisely what customers need in a timely fashion. The company’s IT environment supports this business model.
Business Challenge
In a highly competitive marketplace of ever shortening product lifecycles, faster refresh rates, and increased contrast ratios, ViewSonic realized its competitive edge would be to offer customers maximum flexibility when they placed, checked or changed orders.
ViewSonic needed a solution to streamline operating practices and improve delivery capabilities to retailers, distributors and channel customers. In the past, the company had implemented Gentran® for UNIX from Sterling Commerce, which provided suitable electronic data interchange (EDI) capabilities, including data transformation and translation. While Gentran provided all the capabilities ViewSonic required when they purchased the product, engineers sometimes had to write additional code for subsequent initiatives.
According to Jordan Beseiso, ViewSonic’s Global Business-to-Business Integration Manager, he and his colleagues were more focused on the technology than on growing the business.
“We focused too much on the process — how to move and transform the data as well as how to deploy the process and notify customers,” he said.
The Solution
Now ViewSonic uses the Sterling Commerce Gentran Integration Suite™ (GIS B2B Suite). This GIS B2B Suite provides modular, standards-based support for businesses focused outside the firewall.
“Gentran Integration Suite lets us tie different systems together, model processes, and focus on refining business issues, rather than focus on the underlying technology,” Besesio said.
With Gentran Integration Suite in place, ViewSonic processes more than 50,000 documents annually, giving its business managers access to information in near real time. Since many documents are multimillion dollar purchase orders, accessing the information in near real-time gives ViewSonic a tremendous advantage in the marketplace.“Gentran Integration Suite has helped us open a new distribution channel, which represents tens of millions of dollars of new business,” Besesio said.
The GIS B2B Suite provides centralized partner management capabilities, which allows ViewSonic to establish and manage relationships with major distributors and retailers worldwide. With centralized management, ViewSonic employees use a single interface to monitor business processes as well as navigate reports and statistics in near real- time. Centralized management also provides insight as to where and how processes can be improved. In addition, it lets ViewSonic create trading partner communities by organizing trading partners into groups so they can quickly track documents and trends.
“The centralized partner management capabilities are an important feature for us,” Beseiso said. “We have been able to add and execute key business processes while maintaining our existing staff levels, thus creating new revenue opportunities without incurring additional resource expenses. This is a tremendous benefit when evaluating total cost of ownership for any technology investment. With the GIS B2B Suite, we realized a return on our investment within 12 months.”
The GIS B2B Suite also enables ViewSonic to provide improved, more comprehensive customer service by creating a fully automated order-to cash process that starts with a purchase order and ends in product delivery. This highly-integrated supply chain allows for near real-time purchase order modification, shipment notification and electronic invoicing. When inventory needs change or product lines shift, original purchase orders (and subsequent invoicing) can be modified to meet market demand effortlessly and with greater efficiency and fluidity than ever possible. This eliminates fragmented, manual data transfer via fax or e-mail that can decrease a company’s competitive advantage.
Before and After the GIS B2B Suite
Before implementing Gentran Integration Suite, ViewSonic’s IT staff had to fully understand each system, each process and the complete infrastructure. To troubleshoot, change a process, or add a process someone had to log into the appropriate system, drill down to find the proper directory, and update the map. Now, with Gentran Integration Suite, ViewSonic’s IT staff can track all errors over a period of time, click on an ID, and see exactly what’s going on — without having to log into multiple systems.
Gentran Integration Suite functionality can be extended to ViewSonic's partners, allowing them to check the status of electronically traded documents online if they, too, are using the GIS B2B Suite. For instance, IT staff from both ViewSonic and one of its partners can view an order-related business process anywhere in the workflow in a secure environment. Before GIS B2B Suite, the partner faxed an order to ViewSonic, and an employee manually re-entered the order data, generated a hard-copy invoice, and mailed it. With Gentran Integration Suite, ViewSonic automatically generates and electronically sends its partners advanced shipment notification in near real-time. This comprehensive process automation has streamlined how ViewSonic works with its partners regarding orders, billing and inventory. Additionally, Sterling Commerce makes it easy for ViewSonic to rollout GIS B2B Suite to its customers and partners.
With the Sterling Commerce multi-enterprise approach, ViewSonic combines business intelligence, integration, process management, and delivery functions with an architecture that supports diverse data and communication environments, industry standards, multiple business processes and composite applications.
Key Benefits
Improved Revenue Generation: The GIS B2B Suite has allowed ViewSonic to rapidly respond to new business. “It used to take months to meet electronic requests from major retailers,” Beseiso said. “Now we meet these requests in less than a week and secure more business. In one case, we quickly met the electronic transaction demands of a new customer, and we secured millions of dollars in additional sales.”
Improved Product Delivery and Time to Market: The multi-enterprise collaboration approach lets ViewSonic mine and analyze point-of-sale data, leading to more accurate demand forecasting and planning. This gives ViewSonic better control of its inventory and allows for faster product introductions and delivery times to retailers, ensuring products are at customer sites when, how, and in the quantities needed to grow sales. “This multi-enterprise approach helped us automate new customers while decreasing the time to design, develop and implement B2B electronic integration by 75 percent,” Beseiso said.
Enhanced Customer Service: ViewSonic has moved beyond simple B2B transactions into areas of greater business value, such as near realtime communications with customers. “Gentran Integration Suite automatically notifies our sales force if a customer has modified an order after it’s been sent,” Beseiso explained. “Now our sales team can quickly recommend alternate products to our customers as well as provide details on parti