Sterling Commerce has incorporated business intelligence (BI) into its Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, the vendor's suite of collaborative supply-chain applications. The tool gives customers data about key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing business performance and improving the decision-making process. The Sterling suite covers the inquiry-to-cash process across all selling and fulfillment channels. Users can draw on reports and dashboards of historical data to make process improvements. They can access real-time, context-sensitive data at the point of execution. And they can automate and modify process flow by way of embedded BI. Sterling has built into the application a number of data marts that streamline the availability of BI to users. It has also embedded BI capabilities into specific workflows or scenarios to optimize those processes. Additional capabilities include the automatic reallocation of constrained inventory based on specified priorities, and determination of the maximum discount that can be offered to customers, based on their order and credit histories.

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