Italian luxury goods manufacturer selects software to facilitate order management, supply chain fulfillment with U.S. customers
Columbus, OH — May 9, 2005 — Furla, a manufacturer of luxury goods and leather accessories with headquarters in Villa Bellaria, Bologna, said it has selected the Sterling Commerce B2B integration suite Gentran Integration Suite to improve the effectiveness of its order-to-payment process in the U.S. market and to provide the basis for further collaborative initiatives with its sales agents, supply chain operators and customers across Europe and the United States.
Furla supplies luxury products to fashion retailers worldwide via a global franchise network. The company needed to comply with the demand from its U.S. retail customers, including Bloomingdales and Saks, for business integration capability.
Furla selected Gentran Integration Suite, built on the Sterling Commerce Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA), as well as Sterling Information Broker, value-added network (VAN) service, to streamline, integrate and automate a complex ordering, distribution and invoicing process involving up to five separate partners in the U.S. supply chain.
Prior to implementing business integration, the local Furla franchise relied on a paper-based, manual process for managing orders, deliveries and invoicing, across third-party warehousing and carrier agents as well as customers and Furla headquarters in Milan, Italy. The end-to-end, order-to-payment process was subject to numerous delays and errors, driving down service levels and incurring penalty charges from larger customers.
By integrating the full order-to-payment process and automating the creation of consolidated, accurate shipping and invoicing documents, Furla said it has greatly improved service and responsiveness to customers, as well as eliminated the cost of penalty charges and overall supply chain operations.
The Furla solution uses the Web interface capabilities of Gentran Integration Suite to give staff across multiple organizations and locations the ability to view and manage the same, shared data and process, in real time. It also consolidates and reports data across every stage of the process back to Furla headquarters, for visibility, analysis and administrative purposes.
Claudia Capparucci, IT manager at Furla, commented, "We selected Gentran Integration Suite because we were looking for a solution that could be implemented tactically but that also could be used to develop future services for our suppliers. We now can automate the transition of the electronic purchase orders of our supply chain partners and transfer the [advance shipment notice (ASN)] to the system at the subsidiary, where shipment data can be integrated with billing data to generate electronic billing files from their own database saving on time and resource."
