Saint-Gobain Containers to use Sterling Commerce Tools, Services to Automate Business Processes and Touch More Trading Partners

Headquartered in Muncie, Ind., Saint-Gobain Containers manufactures and distributes more than 10 billion bottles and jars a year to food and beverage industries from 17 plants throughout the United States.The company is a subsidiary of Compagnie de Saint-Gobain, a multinational producer of glass products, building materials, industrial ceramics, high-performance plastics and abrasives.

"We intend to make ourselves easier to do business with and to eliminate the costly and inefficient manual processes we have used in the past to manage our critical business data," said Fred Lewis, vice president of information technology at Saint-Gobain Containers. "After extensive research, we selected Sterling Commerce to help us meet those goals and to grow with us as we integrate the benefits of their exceptional e-commerce tools into more business units within our organization."

Saint-Gobain Containers will use Sterling Information Broker for its data backbone. Sterling Information Broker is a value-added network that provides guaranteed delivery of business-critical documents for thousands of companies worldwide. Saint-Gobain is applying the benefits of Sterling Information Broker services throughout its numerous divisions and business units, furthering the company's ongoing internal integration efforts.

"One of Saint-Gobain's most significant business challenges is to effectively integrate with trading partners unable to transact documents using EDI," said Sam Starr, president and CEO of Sterling Commerce. "Our suite of easy-to-use document exchange tools and implementation services help recruit, educate and connect business partners regardless of size or technical capabilities."

In addition to classic network services, Saint-Gobain Containers will deploy Sterling eTransaction Manager, a desktop tool that leverages XML technology and enables users to exchange EDI-like documents through e-mail. Sterling eTransaction Manager is especially effective for integrating non-EDI partners into an EDI-centric system.

"A significant portion of Saint-Gobain's business is conducted with smaller companies that are very important to us, but costly to service," Lewis said. "When we discovered that Sterling eTransaction Manager could use our existing processes to deliver EDI documents by e- mail to smaller partners, we knew we had a solution."