TradeStone Software reports that Boots The Chemists, a division of Alliance Boots, Europe's leading health and beauty group, has purchased the TradeStone Suite to unify its Asian sourcing process and improve collaboration between divisions, suppliers and transportation providers.

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.

With the TradeStone Suite, manufacturers, suppliers and merchants work together for product development, planning refinement, order management, quality assurance, logistics and finance. 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.

"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," says John Rignall, business systems director for Boots The Chemist. "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."

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