PacSun to Streamline Buying Process with TradeStone

Published: March 13, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Clothing retailer Pacific Sunwear plans to implement on its iSeries servers a new purchasing system from TradeStone Software that should help it get the best deals for the branded and proprietary goods it purchases from clothing manufacturers and distributors, the companies announced earlier this year.

TradeStone's J2EE-based software is designed to make users more profitable by giving them the capability to accurately compare the offers received from different manufacturers. The company's product suite does this by unifying supply chain data points gathered from disparate systems, such as orders, planning, quality tests, and vendor performance; normalizing disparate currencies, languages, and lead times; and automatically calculating the estimated landed costs for goods.

Pacific Sunwear will be using the TradeStone Suite to build a centralized collaboration platform that it will use to put Requests for Quotes (RFQs) out to bid to manufacturers worldwide. Pac Sunwear's vendors, in turn, will respond to those RFQs using the TradeStone system.

After Pacific Sunwear enters an order into the TradeStone Suite, the software will automatically set milestones, such as quality assurance testing, preproduction plans, and production plans, and help manage them between the supplier and buyer, ensuring that quality goods are delivered on time and on budget, while providing Pac Sunwear an eagle's eye view of all sourced and ordered items across all lifecycle phases.

Pacific Sunwear plans to run TradeStone in an AIX partition on its iSeries servers. The Anaheim, California, retailer, which relies heavily on the IBM midrange platform for its back-office processes, would have preferred that the product run on OS/400, but TradeStone doesn't yet support DB2/400, a representative with TradeStone said. TradeStone will interact with various OS/400 applications, including the retailer's warehouse and merchandise management systems, and WebSphere Application Server.

Ron Ehlers, vice president of information services at Pacific Sunwear, has high hopes for TradeStone. "Key to selecting any software for our business is a deep understanding of its technical underpinnings and scalability to support our own growth," Ehlers says. "But even more impressive is the TradeStone Suite's flexibility and built-in best practices. This is truly software that merchants love."

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