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Sunbury-on-Thames —September 16, 2013— GXS, a leading provider of B2B integration services, today announced that its Active Intelligence solution offers operational visibility into the drop ship process. GXS Active Intelligence is designed to improve the quality and timeliness of electronic transactions. Delivered as a Software -as-a-Service solution (SaaS), GXS Active Intelligence enables retailers to monitor and assess the drop ship process to prevent errors before they impact the customer experience.
Increasingly, retailers are having suppliers perform the fulfillment and drop ship of orders placed on their online shopping sites, enabling retailers to avoid holding inventory in their warehouses. While this model allows retailers to reduce their costs and offer consumers lower prices, the increased complexity of tracking high volumes of individual orders through the supply chain adds a new set of challenges. Retailers must be able to ensure suppliers not only ship the requested merchandise but package and deliver it in the requested timeframe. Tracking millions of these orders per year can be challenging even for the largest retail chains.
Active Intelligence tracks the status of all outstanding drop ship orders between retailers and suppliers. Comparing product identifiers, ship-to-addresses, order quantities and delivery timeframes, Active Intelligence identifies any errors or exceptions such as late, incomplete or incorrect shipments. Once identified, Active Intelligence enables retailers to collaborate with their suppliers on a resolution before the consumer is impacted. Active Intelligence can be configured to model a retailer’s specific compliance rules and process workflows.
"As the volume of online shopping continues to grow, the importance of factors such as selection, pricing and shipping timeframes are becoming more critical differentiators in the battle for consumer wallets. The drop ship fulfillment model allows retailers to offer a broader range of merchandise, at a lower price point, often with higher in-stock availability," said Jeff Eckel, SaaS application product manager at GXS. "With GXS Active Intelligence, retailers can confidently leverage the drop ship model without losing sleep at night about potential lost orders and customer satisfaction issues."
More than 200 of the world’s largest retailers and thousands of their suppliers depend on GXS to automate processes ranging from new product introductions and collaborative demand planning to direct store delivery and warehouse cross-docking. Retailers and their suppliers use GXS Trading Grid® to exchange several billion catalog updates, purchase orders, advanced shipment notices and electronic invoices packaged each year.
