Ten years ago footwear and apparel maker Wolverine Worldwide saw that its use of overseas suppliers had started to grow to levels that challenged the way it did business.
Back then Wolverine relied heavily on letters of credit to manage transactions with suppliers in Asia, South America and parts of Europe. But as volumes increased, the company started to seek out technologies that would help it achieve new objectives that focused more on improving visibility, eliminating communication barriers and streamlining cash flow.
"That (old) process no longer suited us in terms of the volumes we were doing," says Dave Coughlin, Wolverine's vice president of finance and administration. "We wanted to find a technology that made the process simpler and more consistent, because as we grew we knew that would help us reduce overhead and control costs in the supply chain--especially in areas like cash flow improvement."
Wolverine soon partnered with a vendor that offers a Web-based, software-as-a-service platform designed to help companies coordinate with suppliers to automate transactions from the purchase order to the payment. The platform now provides Wolverine with an internet-based solution to streamline its entire procure-to-pay process.
Source: Industry Week, http://industryweek.com