End-to-End Solution Provides Lifetouch With New Ways to Reach Its Customers and Fulfill Their Orders
Sterling Commerce Customer Connection
DENVER--At its annual user conference, Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, today announced that Lifetouch, the largest employee-owned photography company in the world, has purchased Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite to augment its business. Implementation of this software will help the company drive a robust business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) model and enhance its ability to work more closely with its customers.
Lifetouch provides professional portraits for consumers through their partnerships with preschools, schools, houses of worship and their own retail locations. Significant growth, enhanced by numerous acquisitions, has created distinct business lines that can touch a customer multiple times. Operating as an assemble-to-order retailer and manufacturer with complex selling and fulfillment operations, Lifetouch wanted to get a single view of its customers on the selling side and a single view of order pipelines, inventory of images and lab capacity on the fulfillment side. These would be key initiatives in helping the company drive greater sales through personalized product bundles, up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, as well as efficiently manage the complexities of production across 12 labs.
“The digital-imaging revolution has redefined the photography industry, creating many new challenges and opportunities, so we knew we had to change the way we do business,” said Jay Drayton, director of information systems architecture at Lifetouch National Studios. “The Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite provides us with a solution to enable us to continue to add value and stay relevant to Mom, her extended family, and the school or church through which the photos are captured.”
Lifetouch processes millions of images a year, so gaining global visibility into where all the images are is an important goal of the company’s fulfillment system. In addition, the company hoped to better match lab capacity and its order pipeline. To help Lifetouch achieve these goals, Sterling Order Fulfillment solutions provided industry-leading distributed order management capabilities. In addition, the solution’s flexible, scalable architecture was important as well as its ability to configure and manage different order fulfillment and payment models. In addition, with Sterling Multi-Channel Fulfillment, Lifetouch will be able to configure its sourcing and production flows to reduce costs and regionalize fulfillment.
“Lifetouch is a company that understands the value of customer intimacy. Despite managing complex business processes across channels, customer segments, productions and supply, they know that keeping this complexity invisible to the customer is key for profitable growth,” said Ken Ramoutar, director of product marketing, Selling and Fulfillment Suite, at Sterling Commerce. “The Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite is designed to help companies like Lifetouch, who face complex challenges, gain a complete view into and control over these to remove the barriers to successful customer and supplier interactions.”
Lifetouch selected Sterling Multi-Channel Selling to support its two-level sales models -- B2B and B2C. The company wanted to expand its business model for direct consumer interaction while improving the account management for its hosts -- the schools, churches and partner retail studios. The company also wanted to provide customers with a personalized and branded buying experience and to increase up-selling and cross-selling of complementary items. By leveraging these capabilities in direct interaction with the consumers, Lifetouch would:
- Increase sales through assisted selling capabilities, which help consumers and their relatives better understand and identify the products and services available and offer opportunities to purchase through multiple, flexible storefronts.
- Increase customer satisfaction by offering bundled solutions that offer unique products at a consumer level, such as creating individual portfolios or combining portraits with ad hoc sports pictures to create a specialized yearbook.
“Sterling Commerce solutions addressed all the functional capabilities we needed, but more importantly, Sterling Commerce is a company that understands B2B and B2C and the interactions between them, which sets them apart in the marketplace,” added Drayton.
Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for managing the entire inquiry-to-cash cycle in the manufacturing, retail, distribution and telecom sectors. The suite provides unlimited visibility and control across an organization’s sales and fulfillment operations, enabling companies to create a superior buying experience for their customers while shielding them from the complexities of their organization, channels and supply chain. The architecture of the suite also enables companies to respond faster to customer and partner requirements and to offer innovative services at a competitive price point.
About Sterling Commerce
Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), helps customers thrive in a global economy by connecting their business communities, processes, people and technology. More than 30,000 customers worldwide -- including 80 percent of the Fortune 500 -- use Sterling Commerce solutions for business process integration, multi-channel selling, and supply chain execution to improve profitability inside and outside their company walls. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Sterling Commerce has offices in 19 countries and most major cities around the world. For more information, please go to www.sterlingcommerce.com.
