Sterling Business Integration Suite Optimizes Hostess Brands Supply Chain Operations

Sterling Commerce (News - Alert) recently announced that Hostess Brands, the largest wholesale bakery and distributer in the United States, has deployed the Sterling Business Integration suite which enables the company to connect, communicate and collaborate inside and outside their enterprise.

The suite enables improved customer interaction within the ecosystem of more than 50,000 partners such as suppliers, bakeries, distribution centers, depots and retailers and also ensures centralized and standardized integration processes into the company’s ERP environment.

Taking full advantage of the solutions, Hostess Brands has implemented the suite to enable seamless and flexible integration and to standardize and centralize B2B integration processes. These implementations not only boost operational efficiency at a low cost, but also provide improved data availability that helps manage change quickly and effectively. Business integration processes such as order-to-cash; item/price synchronization, scan-based trading, returns and supply chain visibility are also optimized using these solutions.

Stacie Derousseau who is the vice president of the IT department at Hostess Brands said, “The flexible deployment options of the Sterling Business Integration Suite have enabled us to quickly adapt as our business needs have changed and evolved.” As an example, the company was successfully able to deliver new customer requirements for item data synchronization within a tight six-week schedule.

Hostess Brand has also deployed Sterling Integrator, which provides a secure B2B gateway to integrate B2B documents and processes between internal systems and application. Another application, namely Sterling B2B manager, helps automate the transformation of business document into compatible data protocol and enable secure exchange of information between trading partners. The portfolio of integration suite also includes Sterling Control Center which can quickly identify and resolve file transfer exceptions thus ensuring improved cycle times.  Moving forward Hostess Brand is also planning to implement Sterling Commerce mobile apps that provide instant and remote access to Business Integration Suite.

Sterling Commerce helps companies optimize and transform their Business Collaboration Network at a small cost along with revenue boost. Sterling Commerce is proactively working with Hostess brand, whose customers vary from big-box retailers to mom-and-pop stores, to quickly resolve issues and the B2B integration as-as-service offering ensures successful delivery of documents to and fro in a timely manner. Hostess Brands now have added visibility and can efficiently manage B2B processes within its entire ecosystem, large or small.