02/05/2007

TradeStone Software, a specialst in delivering the Unified Buying Process™ through domestic and international sourcing, product lifecycle management and order management, today announced that Boots The Chemists, a division of Alliance Boots, Europe’s leading pharmacy-led health and beauty group, has purchased the TradeStone Suite to unify its Asian sourcing process and improve collaboration between divisions, suppliers and transportation providers.

ebizQ received the following details:

Boots sourcing, distribution and retail operations are spread across Europe, Asia and the United States, creating significant disparities in languages, time zones, currencies and processes. To realize the company’s vision of seamless collaboration between all members of the sourcing process, Boots needed to overhaul the existing Asian sourcing management system, which is primarily based on Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and an old legacy AS400. The current primarily paper-based system makes information-sharing a tedious and time-intensive process. Reports can only be updated by one person at a time and then shared via email, a process complicated further by the variations in time zones.

To meet these needs, Boots selected TradeStone Suite, a Web-based application designed to unify the entire buying process. With the TradeStone Suite, manufacturers, suppliers and merchants work together for product development, planning refinement, order management, quality assurance, logistics and finance. The software automatically normalizes the three impediments to global commerce: language, time and currency. TradeStone allows for multiple stakeholders to input data simultaneously and access information in real-time regardless of location. Additionally, all communications are date/time stamped and viewable through a collaboration history on the order, creating an audit trail while eliminating the need for paper. And the TradeStone Suite will layer across existing IT investments, such as SAP, MFG/PRO and other homegrown systems, eliminating the need to rip-and-replace these systems.

“Boots is an international organization with outlets across Europe and Asia. Now, through the merger with Alliance Unichem, the enlarged group is primed to expand into new geographic markets,” said John Rignall, Business Systems director for Boots The Chemist. “Our need for a sourcing solution that can unify processes between suppliers, retailers and freight service providers across the Far East is paramount to our success. After an exhaustive search, we selected the TradeStone Suite because of its ability to bring every stakeholder onto one easy to use system regardless of language barriers, time differences and processes variations.”

“For almost ten years, Boots has been recognized as the most trusted brand in the UK. As they focused on expansion of their sourcing operation around the world, they sought a technology infrastructure that could support their ability to continue delivering the high standard of quality that customers associate with the Boots name,” said Sue Welch, CEO for TradeStone Software. “TradeStone's Unified Buying Process helps improve their internal sourcing practices and external collaboration with overseas suppliers to ensure that very complex levels of product specification are developed, defined, communicated, monitored and measured consistently. Alliance Boots will have an end-to-end global sourcing, PLM and order management solution that enables them to improve profitability while expanding the Boots brand into new markets.”