Sears Awards St. Paul Software Hefty E-Commerce Contract

St. Paul Software (SPS), a business-to-business e-commerce consultancy and software developer, announced on Monday that it has been selected by Sears, Roebuck and Co. to e-commerce enable 5,000 of Sears’ vendors.

This is the second group of Sears’ vendors that SPS has e-commerce enabled. The first group consisted of 1,500 Sears Hardware vendors and took six months to complete. With lessons learned, SPS promises to accomplish the job for the next 5,000 vendors in only four months.

A Challenging Endeavor

If, indeed, St. Paul Software can deliver on its promise, then the company will emerge as one of the world’s leading firms for large-scale, multi-company e-commerce deployment.

That being the case, project managers at the SPS Commerce Service Center will be worth their weight in e-commerce gold.

Modernizing the Retail Giant

Sears, Roebuck and Co. has been pursuing electronic compliance of its entire vendor base, moving toward what SPS describes as “a paperless environment, with both internal and external vendors for financial transactions and cross-departmental functions.”

According to Pete Rector, director of vendor management at Sears, “The full implementation of our required suite of electronic transaction requirements has enabled us to make full use of the cost saving benefits of this technology.”

St. Paul Software’s “Commerce Service Center” has already chalked up considerable experience with e-commerce enabling Sears’ vendors in diverse industries, ranging from hardware to apparel.

For the upcoming project, they will provide Sears’ trading partners with the ability to use electronic Payment Order/Remittance Advice and Credit/Debit Adjustments. Once the enablement is complete, Sears will send and receive all payments electronically, thus avoiding the cost and fraud risks associated with non-electronic methods.

About St. Paul Software

Based on Minnesota, St. Paul Software was founded in 1981 and released their first EDI product in 1984, followed by the release of their UNIX-based product in 1989. The company then expanded further into the electronic commerce market in 1990 with the creation of the SPS Commerce center, and in 1996 released its first Internet-based service.

Late in 1997, SPS Commerce introduced a Java-enabled version of its Internet service, WEB EC. The new service represented a significant advancement in the e-commerce industry by providing customers with the ability to perform electronic transactions over the Internet without needing to purchase software. This Java-based service provides tracking, dynamic business rules validation, and EDI compliance at the desktop prior to transmission.

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